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Rice University and the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations

MR. & MRS. C. M. HUDSPETH

18 SUNSET BLVD.

HOUSTON, TEXAS 77005

Rice University and the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations

■ n^^ED

Tommy LaVergne: inside front and back cover, pages i, 3, 14, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33L, 36, 42, 50L, 51, 56L, 71, 76, 78

Geoff Winningham: pages 15, 16, 33R, 35, 38, 54, 55, 56R, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 73, 74

James Yao: pages 11, 18, 21, 41, 43, 46, 50R, 53, 69, 70

John Hill: pages 6, 9

Houston Chronicle: cover jacket, title page, page 80

Greater Houston Partnership: page 12

Rice University and the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations
By John B. Boles

HHMI

For three days in July 1 990, eight leaders of the major industrial-
ized nations of the Western world met at Rice University. The
event was the sixteenth Economic Summit, an annual meeting that
in many ways has supplanted the United Nations as the forum for
addressing a wide range of economic, diplomatic, environmental, and
human rights issues. Four thousand journalists and supporting staff from
around the world came to Houston to report on the deliberations, and
Houstonians reveled in the excitement, proud to be the site of a history-
making event and curious about how others would respond to their city.
Perhaps never before had the people of the city so come together to help
sponsor an event, eager to do everything perfectly. The city's hospitality
was inexhaustible: its facade was cleaned, polished, and brightened with
flowers, banners, and flags, while food and entertainment was lavished
on the visitors. Numerous motorcades of presidents and prime ministers
disrupted traffic for hours on end, often in the busiest sections of the city
during the rush hours, but citizens accepted the considerable inconve-
nience with a minimum of complaints. The city enjoyed, even celebrated
the summit as it had no other event in its recent history.

Houstonians in general hoped to make a good impression on
both the official delegates and the media leaders, seeing the summit as a
chance to trumpet the city's economic comeback from several years of
deep recession. Perhaps there was a little regret about the arrogance of the
late 1970s oil boom, and now, somewhat chastened, the city extended a
welcome hand to the world. But no part of the city was more involved in
the Economic Summit than the Rice University community — administra-
tors, faculty, staff, alumni, students, and friends — for the actual plenary
meetings of the summit occurred on the Rice campus. Never had the
world's attention so focused on Houston and Rice, and the university, like

the city, saw the occasion as an unrivaled opportunity to make its substan-
tial merits better known.

The colorful opening exercises, complete with a 2 1 -gun salute
and military honor guards flown in from Washington, D. C, were held in
the academic quadrangle of Rice, with elegant Lovett Hall as the back-
drop. As the band played each nation's anthem, the television cameras
focused on that nation's flag unfurled from masts on Lovett Hall with its
ornate brickwork, colored marble and mosaics, and carved arches. After
the arrival ceremonies, and after the first meeting of the heads of the
delegations in the Founders' Room in Lovett Hall, the delegation leaders
walked through the building's impressive Sallyport and into the quad-
rangle for what is called the "class photo." Everyone ever associated with
Rice felt a special pride in that moment. The campus had never looked
better, and those beautiful images of the university conveyed the ethos, the
dedication to academic excellence, that have always been the hallmark of
Rice. Rice had announced its opening in 1912 with a grand, international
convocation of scholars — a summit of the mind — and now once again the
world had come to Rice. The summit's being at Rice therefore seemed
historically appropriate, and the meeting in Houston was a fortuitous
acknowledgement of the city's recent economic rebound. But how had
the sixteenth Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations come to be
held in Houston and at Rice, appropriate though those locations might
have been?

When the first economic summit was planned for the Chateau de
Rambouillet near Paris in 1975, it was assumed to be a one-
time event. But that first meeting proved to be so useful that
world leaders decided to gather again, and President Gerald
Ford offered to host the next year's meeting, which eventually was held in
San Juan, Puerto Rico. Following that second meeting the economic
summit quickly became institutionalized, Canada was added to the origi-
nal list of six participating nations (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the
United Kingdom, and the United States), the group came to be called the
G-7 nations, and a regular cycle for the hosting of the meetings evolved
that followed the sequence of the first seven sites: Rambouillet, San Juan,
London, Bonn, Tokyo, Venice, Ottawa, then back to France at Versailles,
Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia (in 1983), London, Bonn, Tokyo, Venice,
Toronto, and back again to Paris in 1989, beginning the third cycle. (A
delegate from the European Economic Community, formerly called the
Common Market, was invited in 1977 to participate in subsequent sum-
mits, but the European Economic Community : — representing twelve
European nations — does not serve as a host.)

American reporters in Paris at the conclusion of the fifteenth
summit were understandably curious about where the United States would
host the following year's summit, though rumors from the White House
had mentioned Texas and San Antonio. When President George Bush
held his press conference at the close of the Paris meeting, on Sunday,
July 16, reporters asked if the rumors were true about Texas being the site
of the 1990 summit. "That's a distinct possibility," the president an-
swered. "However, it's too early. No decision has been made." President
Bush, obviously in a good mood, went on to quip that "the fact that Jim
Baker is from Houston and I'm from Houston and Bob Mosbacher's from
Texas should have nothing to do with where the next summit's going to
be." Replying to insistent reporters, Bush continued to banter about the
selection process, mentioned the upcoming Texas elections, and cautioned

that the fact that Houston was his Texas home would not be used against
Dallas's chances to host the summit. This entire interchange was reported
on the front pages of Houston's newspapers on Monday, July 17. By the
middle of the week the papers were carrying stories about "summit fever,"
and estimates were being made about the economic benefits that would
accrue as a result of a summit. Wild guesses were being offered about
feasible meeting sites, eating places, entertainment possibilities, and the
odds the summit would go to Dallas, San Antonio, or Houston — or some
place in Colorado or California, other rumored sites in what was already
being portrayed as the summit sweepstakes. But the talk and planning
were not confined to media hype. Hosting an international economic
summit would be an enormous coup for any city, the kind of opportunity
for which any city would compete. Houston leaders, always aggressive
promoters of their city, determined to bid for it both for the intrinsic
prestige and for the occasion to showcase Houston as once again a dy-
namic, growing, futuristic city.

No one in the Houston business or political establishment had
promoted the city as a potential summit site before the newspapers on
July 17 reported President Bush's remarks. In the week following those
remarks, however, everyone began to talk about the best way to proceed.
By Monday morning Mayor Kathy Whitmire, Greater Houston Partner-
ship President Lee Hogan, and Greater Houston Convention and Visitors
Bureau Acting President Henry H. King were discussing possible strate-
gies. On July 19 the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution
urging that the next summit come to Texas, Mayor Whitmire announced
on July 22 that she was considering putting together a task force to work
on the project, and the Houston Protocol Alliance was touting the city's
experience with international dignitaries. In the midst of the excited talk
and premature guesses about meeting sites and parties for dignitaries,
however, several hard questions had to be answered. Obviously there was
the problem of counting chickens before they hatched, but how much of

an effort should be made to attract the summit, and what kind of efforts
would be most effective?

Lee Hogan, President and CEO of the Greater Houston Part-
nership, parent organization to the Greater Houston Chamber of Com-
merce and the Houston Economic Development Council, called an infor-
mal meeting in his office on Sunday, July 23, of approximately a dozen
Houston leaders who had personal or political access to President Bush
and his major advisers. At that Sunday meeting lasting several hours, a
number of the advantages of the summit's coming to Houston were
discussed, but the major concern was whether George Bush was serious
about holding the next summit in Texas. Were those remarks premedi-
tated, almost an invitation for proposals, or were .they offered flippantly?
When the July 23 meeting adjourned, each person left with an assignment
to call people he or she knew in Washington to try to ascertain the nature
of the president's remarks; the meeting participants agreed to gather the
following Sunday in Hogan's offices in the 1 100 Milam Building to share
their information and see if a consensus had been reached. No one actu-
ally talked to the president, but practically every other top adviser —
certainly those with Texas connections — was contacted, and at the follow-
up meeting on July 30 the consensus was overwhelming: George Bush
was very serious about Texas and would welcome presentations on
various sites.

Of course, no one thought at first that President Bush was
considering only a Texas site. Those gathered in Lee Hogan's office
knew that in less than two months Secretary of State James Baker would
be meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnaze for three
days at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to plan for President Bush's early
December Malta Summit with President Mikhail Gorbachev. Perhaps the
real competition was not Dallas or San Antonio but some scenic Western
hideaway. Or perhaps a location— Bretton Woods, site of the 1944
conference that established the International Monetary Fund— in Gover-

nor John Sununu's home state of New Hampshire 1 . This worry lessened as
further discussion led to the realization that no such secluded area had the
support infrastructure to facilitate a full-scale summit. Thousands of hotel
rooms were needed for delegates and journalists; there had to be a large
public airport nearby and a military base for the foreign dignitaries to use;
large nurnbers of police had to be available, as well as superior communi-
cation and medical facilities. Logic led to the conclusion that the site had
to be in or near a major urban area. That decided, the Houston planners
were convinced they could and would beat the offer of any other Texas
city. The next goal was to devise a plan to persuade the White House
advisers and ultimately George Bush that the 1990 Economic Summit
should come to Houston.

A two-pronged approach emerged from the offices of the
Greater Houston Partnership. The preceding week of telephone calls had
revealed that seven people in Washington would be central to the decision
process: President Bush, Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of the
Treasury Nicholas Brady, Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher,
National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Governor John Sununu, and
Sig Rogich, Assistant to the President for Special Activities. Accord-
ingly, seven special contact teams were put together, each with from three
to six members, all of whom knew personally the key decision person they
were assigned to contact weekly. By telephone, by letter, and by other
means they were to communicate how badly the city wanted the summit,
to assure those in Washington that Houston would do a great job of
hosting the event, and to make clear what the city was willing to put up in
terms of support to attract the summit. This intense, high-level, very
personal lobbying played an essential role in tipping the decision toward
Houston.

The second prong of the Houston Partnership effort was to
organize a number of agencies and companies in the city — Metro, the
Greater Houston Visitors and Convention Bureau, Houston Lighting and

Power, Southwestern Bell, the city aviation department, Continental
Airlines, and others — into a series of task forces to bring back to the
Partnership detailed proposals as to how each group would dispatch its
appropriate responsibilities in order to facilitate a successful summit. The
task force information was put into the form of a printed proposal outlin-
ing the city's hotel facilities, air service, transportation capabilities, secu-
rity arrangements, entertainment possibilities, media/communications
support, and consular services and describing the city's previous experi-
ence with delegations of foreign dignitaries. But the heart of the proposal
was a listing, in no ranked order, of six possible sites for the actual work-
ing sessions of the summit: the George R. Brown Convention Center,
Rice University, the Wortham Center, the Summit arena, the University of
Houston, and the Woodlands. This 24-page report, in the form of an
unsolicited proposal, along with a cover letter from Mayor Kathryn J.
Whitmire, County Judge Jon Lindsay, Henry H. King, Chairman of the
Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Ben F. Love,
Chairman of the Greater Houston Partnership, was sent to President Bush
on August 16, 1989.

Several weeks later Lee Hogan of the Greater Houston
Partnership telephoned Sig Rogich, who was in charge of coordinating the
decision process in the White House. Hogan went over the details of the
proposal; Rogich was interested but suggested, off the record, that the
Partnership should identify its best site and focus on it, not half a dozen
sites with no criteria by which Washington could judge. With this advice,
Hogan — a native Houstonian well acquainted with the physical attractive-
ness of the Rice campus — quickly decided that Rice was the ideal loca-
tion. He asked for and received permission from Charles Duncan and
George Rupp, chairman of the board of trustees and president, respec-
tively, of Rice University, to advance Rice as the proposed site of the
summit in Houston.

Why Rice? For everyone involved in the decision, both in
Houston and Washington, the number one asset of Rice was aesthetic.
The beautiful wooded campus, with its ornate Mediterranean style archi-
tecture, offered a stately, serious ambience that suggested the splendor of
previous European summit settings. No place in Texas but Rice had that
kind of physical presence. Less important were the fact that George Bush
had once been an adjunct faculty member in Rice's Jesse H. Jones Gradu-
ate School of Administration and that Secretary of State Baker's grandfa-
ther, Captain James Baker, had been the chairman of Rice's board of
trustees for fifty years, from 1 89 1 to 1 94 1 . Rice was also conveniently
located near good hotels and was accessible from the Brown Convention
Center and the Astrodome, which were offered as the headquarters for the
media and a hospitality center, and the Texas Medical Center. Because it
was virtually a 300-acre island of serenity in the midst of the city, the Rice
campus could be made secure with relative ease. For those reasons Rice
was put forward, and a detailed color photo album was sent to the White
House on September 10. Three days later Lee Hogan went to Washing-
ton, met with Charles Hagel (deputy director of the summit, and at the
time in charge of summit planning), laid out the rationale for Rice, and got
from him a very positive endorsement of the proposed location.

In early October Mayor Whitmire was notified that the city
had made the final cut: a formal request for a proposal came from the
White House to Houston and San Antonio. Remote sites simply did not
have sufficient infrastructure, and locations farther west, by being one or
two additional time zones removed from Europe, were not attractive to the
European media. The White House request covered a broad range of
topics from hotel rates to air connections, and both cities moved quickly to
respond as effectively and persuasively as they could. An even more
detailed report was prepared, with extensive discussion of such topics as
hotel rates, taxi service, welcome packages, security personnel, and
catering services, along with floor plans of the Brown Convention Center

and the Astrodomain, and very detailed floor plans of various buildings on
the Rice campus. The total report, the size of a hefty book and leather
bound, was sent to the White House on November 7 under the name of
Mayor Whitmire.

As the White House personnel studied the Houston proposal
and that of San Antonio, there followed a series of requests for more
specific information and for clarifications. In the several weeks following
November 7, Lee Hogan made four trips to Washington, clarifying
proposals, adding new details, and arguing on behalf of Houston. Repre-
sentatives from the White House (Charles Hagel and Fred Sainz, a staff
assistant) visited Houston on November 16 and 17 and inspected various
locations including Rice. Following that site visit they went on to San
Antonio. Both Houston and San Antonio officials were given opportuni-
ties to refine their offers. Rice officials were quite pointed in their offer of
the campus on an "as is" basis, although this insistence later caused some
tense moments of negotiation. And all the while the seven teams of
personal lobbyists organized by the Houston Partnership were continuing
their contacts with key decision makers in Washington. A copy of
Houston's elaborate proposal was sent to each. Nothing was left to
chance.

Word came from the White House that President Bush
would make the final decision over the Thanksgiving holidays at Camp
David. He had been given briefing books on both Houston and San
Antonio by his staff, complete with the most up-to-date data from each
city. During this crucial week Lee Hogan was called long distance from
Mexico City by Secretary of Commerce Mosbacher, who would be
talking via telephone to the president in two hours. Mosbacher was
checking on one final detail of the Houston proposal, and he tracked
Hogan to a hospital, where Hogan's mother was undergoing an operation.
That Mosbacher made the call in those circumstances hinted to Hogan that
the decision would be favorable. On the day after Thanksgiving, Novem-

ber 24, President Bush met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
at Camp David to discuss his upcoming Malta meeting with President
Gorbachev. Sometime the next day, Saturday, November 25, President
Bush decided that Houston would be the site of the next summit meeting.
Late that evening, a source in the White House called Lee Hogan and
leaked the news. On the following Friday, December 1, 1989, as Presi-
dent Bush was en route to Malta to meet with Gorbachev, the official
announcement came. The 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized
Nations would be held in Houston. The announcement was not more
specific, but everyone in Houston simply assumed the plenary sessions
would be at Rice University. Frederic V. Malek would be appointed to
the rank of ambassador and would be director in charge of all summit
preparations.

But Ambassador Malek had not yet visited Rice, and when he
did, on December 14, the visit did not go as smoothly as Houston and Rice
officials had hoped. At that time even summit planners were not certain
of their needs as to either size, shape, or number of rooms; Rice had
received no detailed outline of the needs. Malek had not been involved in
the decision process that had culminated in the choice of Houston, and he
let it be known during his initial visit that no final decision had yet been
made regarding Rice as the site of the actual meetings. This announce-
ment surprised Rice officials and the Houston media. Malek wanted to
make certain — because he was now in charge of the summit and any
problems that might eventuate would be his responsibility — that the Rice
choice was the correct one, and he wanted to signal that the final decision
on the specific location in Houston was his call. And he did have several
legitimate concerns: the holding rooms for the eight delegations were
nowhere near equal in size, for example, and access to the Founders'
Room in Lovett Hall was limited. At the conclusion of Malek 's visit, the
choice of the summit site seemed to be in limbo. Summit officials even
inspected several skyscrapers with many empty floors, considering

whether summit facilities could be built from scratch inside the shell of an
existing building. Rice officials determined to be patient, answered
Malek's concerns, and let him convince himself that Rice was the appro-
priate place.

Rice officials wanted to find out more about Colonial
Williamsburg's experience in hosting the 1983 summit. On December 19
and 20, Carl MacDowell (overall coordinator of Rice's summit team) and
Jane Lowery (newly appointed to help coordinate the community relations
aspects of summit preparations) visited Williamsburg and were briefed in
detail about the myriad of concerns: facilities, food, protocol, security,
communications, the problem of negotiating a budget contract with the
government. Also, in response to a request, Fred Sainz, a White House
staff person, on December 22 sent Lee Hogan of the Houston Partnership
a brief letter outlining the meeting and support room requirements for the
summit. These stated requirements later proved inadequate, but at least
they gave Houston and Rice officials a better idea of what was involved.
The letter called fpr a main conference room for the major plenary meet-
ing of approximately 2,500 square feet, two smaller conference rooms for
the finance and foreign ministers, holding rooms (waiting rooms or
temporary offices) for the eight heads of delegations in close proximity to
the main conference room, minimum office space for the assistants to the
delegates, dining facilities, a press briefing room near the plenary confer-
ence room, a press filing center, and a hospitality area for the media. Now
Rice knew better how to respond to Mr. Malek's concerns and on January
9 sent him a detailed proposal for holding the working sessions of the
summit on the campus.

Ambassador Malek returned to Rice on January 18, 1990, for
a second site inspection. This time Rice was able to show Malek a wider
range of rooms, including the reading room in the Maconda & Ralph
O'Connor Business Information Center in Herring Hall for the main
plenary meetings, with other meeting sites in Fondren Library, office

space there and in Herring Hall, and holding rooms in Herring Hall and
Lovett Hall. Rice pushed hard to have at least the opening meeting in the
Founders' Room. The Rice presentation was impressive: every question
Malek raised was answered satisfactorily, and Malek was absolutely
convinced that Rice offered splendid summit accommodations. His
decision was announced on January 25 in a press release from the Wash-
ington summit office. "With the Summit working sessions at Rice," the
release stated, "the leaders will be able to meet in a relaxed and distin-
guished environment surrounded by the beautiful campus setting." Am-
bassador Malek said that the Rice setting "allows these leaders to do what
they need to do — have a series of frank discussions in a dignified but
relaxed atmosphere. Rice represents everything good about Houston," he
continued. "It is known worldwide academically and is set in photogenic
grounds of impressive buildings and beautiful oak trees." And he gra-
ciously complimented the cooperation of President George Rupp of Rice
and his staff for accommodating the requirements "of an event of this
magnitude."

It was clear from the beginning that hosting an international summit
"of this magnitude" would involve the entire city, not just Rice
officials. Even before President Bush picked Houston, Lee Hogan
had asked George W. Strake, Jr., a third generation Houstonian and
former chairman of the Republican party of Texas, to chair what would be
called the Houston Summit Committee. Strake had been in the initial
summit strategy session in Lee Hogan's office back on July 23. As
planning was underway, however, President Bush wanted to add someone
who could strengthen the committee's fund-raising. Subsequently
Kenneth L. Lay, the president of Enron Corporation and head of Bush's
1 988 Texas fund-raising efforts, was named cochair of the committee.
Lay was also named to the summit steering committee (consisting of
Mayor Whitmire, Judge Lindsay, Hogan, and Strake), made cochair of it,
and he helped refashion the Houston Summit Committee into the Houston
Host Committee.

The Host Committee was expanded to include approximately
290 leaders representing virtually every component of Houston society:
business, education, sports, media, minorities. These persons were orga-
nized into four subcommittees with responsibility for special events
(chaired by John H. Duncan and Elizabeth Christ), cleaning up the city
(Don Fitch and Limas Jefferson), publicity (John Bookout and Ben F.
Love), and welcoming delegates and media personnel (W. J. Bowen and
Vidal Martinez); symbolically, this last group was labeled the "friendly"
subcommittee. Under the direction of Lay and Strake, these committees
immediately set to work, with all of them charged to help with fund-
raising. Everyone knew that to host the summit would cost money,
though no one knew how much. Eventually over $4 million in money and
$8 million in in-kind contributions were raised. Elaborate plans were
made for conducting a war on trash, and this cleanup campaign recruited
an estimated twelve thousand Houstonians who picked up more than four
million pounds of rubbish and cleaned up 2,5 19 city blocks.

Neighborhood organizations near Rice got into the spirit of
the Host Committee effort by sponsoring a campaign to plant 33,000
scarletta (red) begonias in esplanades, near the various entrances to Rice,
and in pots provided at cost to homes in the vicinity. Metro cooperated by .
offering free bus service during the summit, even utilizing special new
buses partially manufactured in Hungary, which some wit termed glasnost
buses. Recognizing in advance that many visitors to Houston in July
would comment that the weather was hot, the Host Committee decided to
turn that negative cliche into a positive plug by coining the motto
"Houston's Hot," then, with a play on words, proceeding to say that yes,
Houston's economy was hot and booming again. Old-fashioned hand fans
emblazoned with "Houston's Hot" proved to be popular giveaways at the
Media Fest held on Saturday before the opening of the summit.

The Houston Host Committee began making elaborate plans
not only to provide a proper work environment for the attending media
personnel but also to feed and entertain them royally. In addition, the
Host Committee completed arrangements for a down-home Texas barbe-
cue and rodeo on the Sunday evening before the summit itself actually
opened and for a festive "Thank You, Houston" party following the
summit for all the volunteers who would have helped make it a success.
Both these special events — the rodeo and the thank-you celebration —
represented the wishes of President Bush. Consequently the Host Com-
mittee efforts were closely coordinated by the expanding staff of summit
officials, with Deputy Director Charles (Chuck) Hagel in charge of day-
to-day operations. In late March native Houstonian Homer Luther, with
almost two decades' experience in arranging major presidential-level
special events, was called upon to direct all public (that is, involving
President Bush or other heads of delegations) events related to the summit.
Shortly thereafter the summit organizers chose as their headquarters the
Kirby Mansion, on the western edge of downtown just outside the Pierce
elevated. The stately brick home was originally built in 1 892 as a Victo-

rian design house for lumber magnate John Henry Kirby. Kirby had the
house substantially enlarged and remodeled in a Flemish-Gothic style in
time for a visit in 1 928 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was attending
the Democratic National Convention held in Houston that year to deliver
the nominating speech for Al Smith. The mansion has had a checkered
history, and, as a result of the oil recession in Houston during the mid-
1980s and the even more recent savings and loan difficulties, the house is
currently in receivership. It nevertheless made a handsome and conve-
nient home for the 1990 summit officials.

Very early in summit preparations the planners decided that
press operations would be centered at the Brown Convention Center.
Early estimates that 5,000 members of the press would attend the summit
were only slightly optimistic; but of the 4,000 who did come, perhaps
2,500 were support personnel: cameramen, photographers, television
technicians, and so on. Still, the 1,500 actual writing or reporting journal-
ists would not be allowed to come to Rice en masse. Instead, the press
delegates would choose a revolving group of approximately thirty journal-
ists representing a variety of media who were to be bused to the Rice
Memorial Center and from there conducted by security personnel to
carefully selected and monitored press and photo "opportunities." These
pool reporters would then brief their colleagues at the Brown Convention
Center. Likewise, CBS was selected to provide the pool television cover-
age. This procedure meant that the great majority of journalists would
conduct all their reporting from the Brown Convention Center.

The Host Committee reasoned that if the working press were
well treated, then the city might expect more favorable coverage. Previ-
ous summits had provided the press with adequate food and some ameni-
ties, but nothing lavish. For example, at the Williamsburg summit the
press had been fed in a large tent erected over the tennis courts of the
College of William and Mary. Consequently the press proved to be
astonished by the hospitality arranged by the Houston Host Committee.

Dozens of Houston restaurants provided free food that filled a half dozen
buffet lines arranged with everything from Japanese cuisine to traditional
American dishes to southwestern favorites. Three hundred catering
employees made sure no journalist went hungry or thirsty anytime. Hun-
dreds of linen-covered tables stretched beyond the food lines, and nattily
appointed waiters and waitresses quickly offered tea, coffee, and wine to
appreciative media workers. In addition, there was always free coffee, ice
cream, cigarettes, toothpaste, and toothbrushes, along with a wide range of
other toiletry items. Another special touch was provided by the interna-
tional construction company Brown & Root, which organized a press
"cafeteria" offering free each day that day's edition of newspapers from
around the world. A journalist could file a story one evening to the Los
Angeles Times or the Times of London and the very next morning read the
story while eating a free breakfast. When observers saw how hard the
press worked at covering the summit, they understood why the journalists
were so appreciative of what the Host Committee provided at the Brown
Center.

Even before the summit began on Monday morning, the press
was well disposed toward the Host Committee. Most of the members of
the press began arriving Friday and Saturday, July 6 and 7, and the Host
Committee sponsored an elaborate Media Fest for Saturday evening. Fifty
Metro buses began picking up members of the press in front of the Brown
Center, with country music, cowboys, and a live longhorn steer providing
a stereotypical backdrop. But the champagne served on the buses sug-
gested that this was not an evening to be confused with Sunday night's
rodeo. Saturday's occasion was a progressive dinner party at Houston's
four major museums. One could begin with Cajun food and music at the
Menil Collection, then travel via shuttle buses to rock music and Mexican
food at the Museum of Natural Science, then more music and food at the
Museum of Fine Art, and conclude with desserts and music at the Con-
temporary Art Museum — or go in any other order. The press was over-

whelmed. Several may have remarked snidely that Houston was trying
too hard to please, but more representative was Ulrich Schiller of Die Zeit
(of Hamburg, Germany). "This is exceptional," he was quoted as saying
in the Houston Chronicle. "To eat this food and hear this music and then
be able to enjoy a world-class museum is just outstanding." That, of
course, was exactly the response the Host Committee had hoped and
worked for in planning the extravaganza.

The Host Committee, working closely with the summit
officials and the protocol office of the State Department, also helped with
arranging hotel accommodations for the various national delegates.
Representatives of each of the nations involved in the summit also came to
inspect the facilities at Rice, at the Brown Convention Center, and at the
hotels selected for their leaders and their support personnel. These visits
often proved to be tricky business for both Houston and summit officials
because each nation was very protective of its rank and prestige. Accom-

modations had to be approximately equal in size, quality, convenience,
and ambience. Inevitably some feathers were ruffled when one delegation
wanted the hotel suggested for another nation. The Japanese, for example,
preferred the Inn on the Park and so did the Canadians, but because a
Canadian firm owned the hotel, Canada got it. The Japanese were eventu-
ally made happy at the J. W. Marriott in the Galleria area, however. The
British delegation was housed at the Ritz-Carlton, the Italians at the
Wyndham Warwick, the Germans at the Doubletree on Post Oak, the
French at the Westin Oaks, the representatives of the European Economic
Community at the Stouffer Presidente, and the Americans at President
Bush's Texas "home," The Houstonian. Each hotel underwent some
refurbishment, learned the intricate niceties of international protocol,
added appropriate national items to their menus, underwent extensive
security checks, and prepared to house not only the heads of the various
delegations and their top advisers but also the govemment-away-from-

home of the several industrialized nations.

President Bush made it clear early in the summit preparations
that he wanted his international visitors to get a taste of Texas during their
visit to Houston. Local planners had hoped to showcase Houston's fine
arts to a world audience, but these hopes were soon dashed for a combina-
tion of reasons. No regular performances of the symphony, ballet, or
opera were scheduled to occur during the summit meetings, and the
expense of mounting special performances was enormous. Moreover,
there would be no time in the Monday midday until Wednesday midday
formal summit schedule for such performances, and the World Cup of
soccer would keep several of the international delegates from arriving
before Monday morning.

Then too, summit organizers, responding to President Bush's
clear signals, reasoned that government leaders from such cities as Lon-
don, Paris, Rome, and Bonn had numerous opportunities to attend high-art

performances. (At the last moment a special, shortened performance of
Houston Grand Opera's "Carousel" was staged Saturday afternoon in the
Wortham Center for the Bushes and an invitation-only audience of local
music students, members of the consulate corps, representatives of the
city's performing arts groups, and selected business, civic, and educational
leaders.) What the international visitors did not normally see at home
were rodeos and country music concerts, and, given the worldwide identi-
fication of Texas with the Old West, many of them apparently wanted to
see what to some Houstonians was an embarrassing and obsolete stereo-
type of Texas culture. But this was to be the president's party, so rodeo it
was. Moreover, because the president had long admired the Grand Ole
Opry, at his invitation a contingent of Opry stars — Loretta Lynn, Minnie
Pearl, Bill Monroe — agreed for only the second time in the Opry's history
to take their show on the road. There would be a sprinkling of Texas
singers too, but the Texas hoedown following the rodeo would have a

decidedly Tennessee flavor.

Native Texans could take at least some culinary comfort in the
food that would be provided to the rodeo guests, several thousand media
people, a group of local volunteers and summit organizers, and, as it
turned out. President and Mrs. Bush, Prime Minister and Mr. Thatcher,
Prime Minister and Mrs. Mulroney, and Prime Minister and Mrs. Kaifu.
One can hardly imagine the jostling among local barbecue chefs that must
have preceded the event, but when the 4,812 visitors arrived at the
Astroarena on Sunday evening, July 8, they found a genuine Texas
banquet provided by Luther's Barbecue. The caterers served 7,200
pounds of brisket, ribs, chicken, and sausage; 3,000 pounds of potato
salad, coleslaw, and baked beans; 165 gallons of barbecue sauce; 500
pounds of sliced onions; 650 gallons of iced tea and lemonade; 5,000
slices of carrot cake and cherry cobbler; and, in deference to the
uninitiated taste buds of the visitors, only 84 gallons of jalapeno peppers.
The whole occasion — barbecue and wild bull riding, armadillo racing and
bucking broncos, clog dancing and rope tricks, country humor and the
distinctive twang of Bill Monroe's singing — entertained most of the
attendees, though Mrs. Thatcher and her British colleagues seemed at best
uncertain about the evening. Perhaps the highlight was when a young
woman waving an American flag rose out of a giant cowboy boot — Texas
kitsch to be sure, but sanctioned by the White House. The world press,
fascinated by the goings-on, devoted inordinate attention in both words
and photos to this presidential paean to the mythic Texas past.

The backward glance at the Old West was a sentimental interlude in
the summit agenda, a meeting being held in a modern city known
both for the Johnson Space Center and the Texas Medical Center,
where the newest miracles in medical science were commonplace.
International television reports from the Brown Convention Center featured
the city's stunning skyline in the background, enlivened by eight colorful
plastic "light sticks" (designed by architect Jay Baker, a Rice graduate) in
the foreground that were artistic representations of the flags of the partici-
pating delegations. Rodeos and museum media fests, however novel and
entertaining, were preliminary to the real business at hand, a series of
high-level plenary meetings to be held on the stately campus of Rice
University with its Old World look.

But between the official choice on January 25 of Rice as the
site of the plenaries and the arrival on campus of the dignitaries, beginning
shortly after noon on July 9, absolutely incredible preparations had to be
made. No one in those heady days of late January foresaw the dimensions
of the task, and even in retrospect what was demanded and achieved
seems as heroic as it sometimes seems ridiculous to Americans with
democratic ideals. And yet there were often sound reasons for what on the
surface appeared to be rank extravagance. Rice became almost a movie
set and a sound stage for events broadcast to the world for three days in
July 1990.

Behind all the preparations at Rice lay the university's initial
offer of its facilities on an "as is" basis, and the government, being fully
aware of these terms since at least November 17 and in receipt of a formal
Rice proposal dated January 9, 1990, accepted the offer on February 9.
But most of the details of the arrangement still had to be negotiated and
agreed upon, with Carl MacDowell representing Rice's interests. The
Rice position was very clear: the government could have total access to
specified Rice facilities from Saturday evening at 6:00 P. M., July 7,
through Thursday morning, 6:00 A. M., July 12. These specified facilities

came to be identified as Lovett Hall and the buildings surrounding the
academic quadrangle, the Faculty Club (Cohen House), Herring Hall, the
Rice Memorial Center, the six residential colleges south of the academic
quadrangle, and much of the stadium parking lot. Under agreed-upon
security procedures faculty, staff, and graduate students would have
necessary access to laboratories north of the academic quadrangle. This
was insisted upon by Rice officials to lessen the inconvenience to the
scientific research activities of the university. Except for Monday, Tues-
day, and Wednesday, July 9-11, normal summer classes would be held and
the library would function as usual. The central activities of the univer-
sity, teaching and research, would be disrupted as little as possible.

More difficult to negotiate with the government was the
budget. Rice made clear that its "as is" offer stood; whatever the govern-
ment wanted to add or change regarding the campus buildings was
permitted as long as the government paid for the changes and removed
them at the conclusion of the summit. Rice agreed to pay for permanent
long-term improvements and to speed up already planned refurbishments
such as repairing and painting the ceilings of the cloisters of Lovett Hall
and certain landscaping that was part of a long-range scheme to enhance
the campus. Yet there was still room for disagreement, and MacDowell
and the Rice administration bargained hard to minimize the out-of-pocket
expenses to the university.

At times the negotiations became quite tense, leading to
pressure on Rice from powerful voices on the Houston Host Committee.
The Host Committee offered Rice no funds at all and made it clear that
Rice should do no summit-related fund-raising because to do so might
harm the Host Committee's efforts; from certain quarters both in Houston
and Washington there was the feeling that Rice should be lavish in its
support of summit expenses. The Rice position was that the Rice endow-
ment was for educational expenses, not to help the federal government
stage grand events even though Rice stood to gain substantial publicity as

a result. Where did appropriate hospitality on the part of Rice end and
inappropriate parsimony begin? What was a legitimate permanent en-
hancement and what was merely summit-related fluff? When White
House officials wanted to remodel the bathroom near President Rupp's
office because President Bush would spend perhaps fifteen minutes in that
office, should Rice assume the cost because the new wallpaper would
remain? Ultimately the government paid for the wallpaper. Rice installed
a new mirror, and Rice convinced the government that an entirely new
commode was an extravagance; a new toilet seat would suffice. In such
practical applications the issue of who would pay for what became enor-
mously complicated. Was Rice being too tightfisted and stubborn? Were
summit officials expecting too much largess? After several months of
tough negotiating, pressure from downtown, the involvement of additional
Rice administrators, and a renewed commitment to cooperation from
everyone centrally involved, a final contract between Rice and the State
Department was signed on April 30.

Long before the contract was signed, work was underway on
the Rice campus. One obvious need was adequate and backup electrical
power. Houston Lighting and Power engineer George I. McDaniel had
been involved in the city's planning from the beginning, and he and
HL&P engineers quickly ensured that sufficient power was available at
each summit site. The Brown Center and the Astroarena were already
prepared; portable, quiet-running generators were used to back up existing
service at Bayou Bend and the Museum of Fine Arts, where two official
summit dinners would be held, and the service to Rice was upgraded.
Rice since the 1950s had had two separate 12,470 volt lines serving it
from the Garrett Street substation, located at the Y where the Southwest
Freeway exits to Louisiana Street downtown. The two separate lines
guaranteed continuous service in case an accident disrupted one line. An
additional third power source came from the west and served the stadium
facilities and backed up power to the Rice Memorial Center (where the

U. S. Secret Service was headquartered). Guards were placed at the
Garrett Street substation to protect against possible terrorists, and portable
generators were positioned to provide power to television booths built in
front of Lovett Hall. Electrical service to the various plenary sites on
campus had to be significantly upgraded to handle television lighting and
the communication and computer needs of the participants. This required
another portable generator placed at the north end of Lovett Hall. In
addition, the lighting around the exterior of the campus was increased,
particularly at the entrances. HL&P assumed the expenses of this upgrad-
ing and complete checking out of the system and all its redundancies.
Unlike at the Paris summit, at no time was there a failure of any kind in
electrical service for the Houston summit.

Far more extensive upgrading of the telephone communica-
tions system at Rice had to be done, provided gratis by Southwestern Bell
and supervised by engineer Martin E. Spahn. The existing system was
based on a 1 ,500 pair copper cable, with a capacity (almost filled) of 1 ,500
working lines. This system was doubled and significantly improved by
installing a fiber optic backbone at Rice. Fiber optic provides better
transmission, is more easily expandable, and is much more secure because
it is very difficult to tap. It also makes possible state-of-the-art communi-
cation of every kind: voice, data, or video transmission. During the
summit, university communications continued to be via copper cable, but
all summit-related communications were on the new fiber optic system;
and soon after the summit, Rice transmissions would shift permanently to
the new system, provided at no charge to the university by Southwestern
Bell. Not only will this $1.5 million system improve communication
locally and give Rice direct data and video transmission capabilities to the
Texas Medical Center and the Houston Advanced Research Center, but it
will also make it possible for Rice to link up with two proposed and
extremely advanced computer networks that will connect Texas area
research centers and a national computer system. These networks will

complement existing linkages between Rice and computers nationwide.

The fiber optic system tied together all the summit sites at
Rice, facilitating internal communication (voice, data, video, and an
electronic writing tablet system whereby advisers at plenary sessions
could communicate via instantaneous transmission of handwritten notes to
delegate officials), linked the temporary delegate offices at the university
to the hotel accommodations of the various nations, and linked these
locations both to the respective government offices back in the home
countries and to the contingent of each nation's journalists at the Brown
Center. For all practical purposes, the governments of the G-7 nations
were being run from Houston for several days, so sophisticated communi-
cation facilities were mandatory. The fiber optic system connected Rice
via an underground tunnel beneath Main Street to a fiber optic link down
Fannin and thence to the Central Office Terminal (the Jackson exchange)
on Richmond Avenue between Mandell Street and Montrose Boulevard.
Voice and data transmissions were sent from there to New York City and
then abroad via an AT&T fiber optic. Rice and the Brown Center were
also connected via fiber optics, and then clean video transmissions were
sent via fiber optic from there to a satellite uplink facility in far southwest
Houston. Houston International Teleport, in cooperation with other
facilities of its owner, Satellite Transmission and Reception Specialists
(STARS), provided 24-hour live television feeds for its American, Japa-
nese, and European customers.

Southwestern Bell was the major provider of telecommunica-
tions equipment and service and had over 1,000 personnel assigned to the
project for months. Other long-distance providers, cellular telephone
companies, and telecommunications specialists were involved, represent-
ing a permanent and temporary investment in hardware — phones, fiber
optics, switching equipment, cellular and satellite antennae, and so forth —
of approximately $50 million. Much of this system was dismantled after
the summit and will be deployed elsewhere, but permanent enhancements
of the city's communication infrastructure did result, particularly at Rice

with its new fiber optic communication backbone. While the eyes of the
world were focused on Houston, the telecommunications system made it
all possible.

Much of the summit agenda was staged and timed for
television coverage, with special attention given to camera angles, position
of the sun and resulting shadows, and photogenic "photo-ops" for trans-
mission around the world. This need drove the efforts to facilitate and
enhance the television images. A series of glass-walled television broad-
cast booths were erected in an arc on the east lawn of Lovett Hall, linked
via underground fiber optic cables to local television stations and the
satellite uplink. Portable generators made air conditioning possible; from
these booths local, national, and international television broadcasts —
including interviews with participants like James Baker— were initiated
live, with the flag-festooned east front of Lovett Hall serving as a back-
drop. Because daytime in Japan is night in Houston, Rice installed power-
ful concealed lighting to illuminate the east facade of Lovett Hall to make
possible live Japanese broadcasts throughout the night. A small, raised
stand for photographers and television cameras was constructed that
angled to the north from near the east side of the Sallyport. This stand
accommodated press coverage of the arrival of the heads of the delega-
tions at curbside in front of Lovett Hall.

Television cameras were also mounted on the roof of the
southwest corner of the Physics Building and atop Fondren Library, as
well as one on the ground near the cloisters linking Sewall Hall to Lovett
Hall. These pool cameras provided television coverage of the opening
ceremonies in the academic quadrangle. Two three-tiered raised stands,
complete with telecommunication hookups, were also provided for print
and television pool journalists in the quadrangle, the larger stand (80 x 12
feet) parallel to Lovett Hall just east of the statue of William Marsh Rice
and the smaller one (50 x 12 feet) adjacent and parallel to Sewall Hall.
Between this smaller stand and Lovett Hall was a small stand covered
with a tent canopy where the spouses of the heads of delegations along

with the other members of the delegations could sit to watch the opening
activities.

Between the larger media stand and Lovett Hall stood the
small (22 x 8 feet) president's reviewing stand for the heads of delega-
tions, complete with an underground air-conditioning system and an
added-at-the-last-possible-moment roof to shield the delegates from the
anticipated blazing sun but high enough not to interfere with ever-essential
camera angles. Luckily Rice planners had expected last-minute changes
and had put a convenient lumberyard on call throughout the weekend.
Among the unsung heroes of the entire summit effort were Thomas W.
Moffett of Rice and his facilities employees, who performed incredible
feats of erecting and tearing down elaborate stands. By 9:00 Monday
evening, following the opening ceremonies, all the stands inside the
academic quadrangle had been removed and the sod replaced. At times
the international media seemed to focus more on the air-conditioned
reviewing stand than the substantive events of the summit; that engineer-
ing feat exemplified Rice's commitment to do everything possible to
guarantee that all summit events on campus would proceed without a
hitch. As it turned out, everything performed perfectly, prompting even
the taciturn Secret Service men to say they had never worked such a
smoothly organized summit. Of course, good things are seldom the result
of happenstance. The summit success at Rice was the result of careful
planning and dedicated workers, and not just at the management level.
The physical plant employees (under the supervision of W. G. Mack) and
the custodial and grounds crews (supervised by Eusebio Franco, Jr.) put
in extremely long hours and responded with admirable enthusiasm to the
additional chores. A genuine esprit de corps developed that no one had
completely anticipated but everyone appreciated.

In addition, Rice made arrangements to secure for itself a
photographic record of the elaborate summit preparations and the actual
plenary sessions. Staff photographer Tommy LaVergne took hundreds of

pictures of every stage of the preparations as well as the opening ceremo-
nies, and Geoff Winningham, Rice professor of media and photography,
was accorded the status of White House photographer and allowed to take
pictures at all the formal sessions. Rice planners intended from the
beginning that a selection of these photographs would be displayed at a
post-summit exhibition, presented in slide form to various university
audiences, and used to illustrate this book.

Thanks to the insistence of Edgar Odell Lovett in 1910 and the
design brilliance of architect Ralph Adams Cram, Rice University has
long had one of the most admired campuses in America, with perhaps an
unprecedented degree of stylistic conformity. Not every building and
every siting, however, was equally good, and with two major new build-
ings under construction — housing the Shepherd School of Music and the
new laboratories of biomedical science and engineering — the Rice Board
of Trustees had begun to seek a new landscaping vision for the next half
century ("landscaping" meaning sidewalks, roads, signage, every visual
aspect of the campus). When the summit was announced for Rice, it
simply meant that special landscaping attention also had to be given
immediately to those portions of the campus intended to serve as a back-
drop for the event. Rice had employed the services of a renowned firm,
Sasaki Associates, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop a total
landscaping plan; now parts of that plan would be hastened into realization
to fit the summit schedule. White House and summit planners had def-
inite requirements that had to be addressed, a process that at times intensi-
fied already tense budget negotiations as to who would pay for what.

Both Rice officials and summit planners wanted those parts
of the campus visible to delegates and the press to look as beautiful as
possible. Under the direction of landscape architect Stuart O. Dawson,
selected trees and shrubs were planted that enhanced photo-op back-
grounds and simultaneously meshed with the long-range landscaping
scheme. Because the heads of the delegations would walk east from

Herring Hall on Tuesday noon under the oak-canopied road between
Baker College and Rayzor Hall and then turn into the Faculty Club for
lunch — and this walk was a carefully orchestrated occasion for television
and still photographers — Stu Dawson suggested a graceful patio outside
the north entrance to the club. Not only would this make a lovely setting
for the pre-luncheon procession, but by slightly shifting a sidewalk lead-
ing from Lovett Hall it both created a vista through the Lovett cloisters
toward the Faculty Club and highlighted a particularly handsome window
over which was carved the Rice seal. The courtyard at Herring Hall was
also very significantly enhanced with plantings and patio stones.

This kind of permanent improvement of the campus, com-
pletely compatible with Cram's original vision of buildings arranged on
visually pleasing axials, Rice was happy to fund. After difficult discus-
sion, Rice also reluctantly agreed to plant some 50,000 square feet of sod
along roads and sidewalks where the green would complement television.

shots. Much of this grass, under thick-foliaged live oaks, predictably had
a short life, but White House officials pressed very hard that Rice's offer
of its campus implied grassy vistas, at least for the duration of the summit.
Though Rice gave in on this issue and even had to resort to painting some
of the dying grass green, officials were able to withstand summit planners'
desires to enliven and brighten the campus with a profusion of flowers.
White House planners thought the campus^ — necessarily devoid of stu-
dents during the summit — would have a sterile appearance. The landscap-
es' solution was to position over two hundred large terra-cotta pots (most
of them 24 inches in diameter), filled with white periwinkles, between the
columns of the arches lining the academic quadrangle and arranged in
rows in front of Fondren Library and Lovett Hall.

Although at first the abundance of color seemed out of place,
even seemed too busy amid the quiet beauty of Lovett Hall, the new look
soon became pleasing even to skeptical campus observers. Practically

everyone agreed that in the televised shots of the opening ceremonies,
with President Bush walking the arriving dignitaries through the cloisters
from the Sallyport toward the patio at the north end of Sewall Hall, the
flowers looked beautiful against the brick-and-granite arches. The 206
flower pots and 5,688 other bedded periwinkles in the quadrangle and at
entrances one and two to the campus were paid for by the government,
and original plans called for the pots to be removed shortly after the
conclusion of the event. At the end of the summit, however, the govern-
ment gave the terra-cotta pots with their periwinkles to the university.
In several locations Rice rebuilt sidewalks, repaired or in-
stalled curbs, had an offending fireplug moved out of an otherwise
unobstructed vista, and generally dressed up the campus. Long-term
plans included repaving the roads around the inner campus loop, so this
project was rushed to completion before the international guests arrived.
One major Rice-incurred landscaping expense was totally unrelated to the

summit. During the early spring visits of delegation advance teams, the
Rice community began to notice that the thirty trademark Italian cypress
trees that adorned the academic quadrangle were turning brown. As a
consequence of Houston's record-breaking December 1989 cold spell, the
tall, cylindrical trees were dying. Research suggested that similar species
of trees would have fared no better, so an effort was begun to purchase
new Italian cypresses. But not enough large ones were available any-
where in the nation. It seems some giant Las Vegas casino had recently
cornered the market, so Rice had to settle for slightly smaller trees. Be-
cause apparently the original cypresses had also been weakened by excess
soil dampness, a complicated drainage system was constructed to take
away water from the root system of the trees at the same time that a
watering system was installed at ground level. This extensive plumbing
and planting was hurriedly completed before the summit, barely in time
for the resodding to look natural.

All over campus there was an atmosphere of nervous anticipa-
tion: Because important company was arriving, we had better clean up
and repaint and show our best face. The new paving, however, presented
an unanticipated problem. In the June heat the asphalt cured slowly; when
it was learned that the heavily armored, four-wheeled limousines weighed
approximately 8,000 pounds each, planners grew concerned that the
limos would leave deep ruts in the still soft roads. Consequently the roads
were sprayed with cooling water at night and special machines were
brought in to compact the asphalt and thereby aid its curing. It worked.
No limos were mired in the paving, and the freshly black roads, with
speed bumps removed, presented a good, shadow-free foreground for the
Tuesday photo opportunity of the eight heads of delegations walking
down College Way for lunch at the Faculty Club.

Casual visitors to the campus in the late spring might have
thought that all the preparations were outside the buildings. That was true
until after classes were over and graduation ceremonies were held on
Saturday, May 5. But the following Monday evening — after most stu-
dents and many faculty left — workers began swarming into Fondren
Library and Herring Hall, and to a far lesser extent into Lovett Hall and
Sewall Hall, to effect an almost miraculous transformation of the public
spaces that would for three days in July become perhaps the most care-
fully secured private meeting rooms in America. The summit office in
Washington contracted with a local architectural firm, PDR, Planning
Design Research Corporation, with Drew Patton supervising, to revamp
the existing spaces to fit summit needs and redecorate all the spaces
appropriately. As the State Department contract with PDR frankly stated,
"Cosmetic appearance of the meeting rooms is of paramount importance
for this international event." With that general guideline, PDR set to work
transforming Rice offices and library rooms from an academic setting to
what was called a setting for world diplomacy.

The four plenary meeting rooms received the most attention.

Following Monday's opening ceremony, the heads of the eight delega-
tions would meet privately for two hours in the Founders' Room of Lovett
Hall. At this restricted plenary meeting no foreign ministers or finance
ministers would be in attendance, although the chief policy adviser of each
delegation head would be present. (These chief advisers have, in summit
parlance, come to be known as "sherpas," after the Tibetan people who
traditionally guided mountain climbers to the summits of the Himalayas,
so henceforth that term will be employed here.) Minimum changes were
made in this room: rest room facilities were shifted; a cherry and maple
veneered oval table, twenty feet by nine feet, was designed (by Wayne H.
Braun of PDR) and constructed by the Houston firm of Brochsteins Inc.
(headed by Rice alumnus Raymond D. Brochstein); and work stations for
the eight sherpas were positioned around the perimeter of the room.
Toward the north end of the room and in the north balcony, interpreters
booths were constructed. Special lighting was added and telecommunica-
tions equipment provided to the sherpa work stations so the sherpas could
communicate via handwritten notes on an electronic writing pad to the
delegation offices in Lovett Hall. No audio transmissions were to be made
from this Founders' Room meeting, although each nation would have
closed-circuit television pictures of its leaders to monitor his or her health.
The flags of the several delegations hung from the ceiling of the Founders'
Room.

Extensive changes were demanded for the two rooms hous-
ing the Monday afternoon meetings of the foreign ministers and the
finance ministers in the Elder Periodical Room and the Wright Reference
Room respectively of Fondren Library. Essentially the rooms were
transformed into handsome boardrooms, furnished with equally ornate
tables made of the same cherry and maple veneer as the Lovett Hall table.
These two round tables, nine feet and eighteen feet in diameter, were also
designed by Wayne Braun and built by a Brochsteins subsidiary. Architec-
tural Woodwork Corporation. Luxurious leather chairs were provided;

aiumnmi

plants and paintings decorated the rooms, and the'Cullen Rotunda between
the two rooms was handsomely appointed with gold-fringed flags of the
participating nations hanging from brass footstands. The round reference
desk and the card catalogue computer terminals that normally lined the
Wright Reference Room were removed, the carpet replaced where the
reference desk stood, and the several exits from the room walled over.
The entrance toward the rotunda was decreased in size and closed with
mahogany doors. Television lights and cameras were installed, with the
closed-circuit television signals sent to a bank of screens in an adjacent
library room. In front of this line of television screens were closed booths
for the fifteen interpreters, three each for five languages; only in this
meeting of the eight finance ministers and their eight assistant sherpas
were the interpreters not in actual line of vision with the principals whose
words they were translating.

More extensive remodeling was done for the Monday

afternoon meeting of the foreign ministers in the Elder Periodical Room.
The circulation desk and the stairwell from the basement to the second
floor were walled off. Then two-story walls were built so that the mezza-
nine no longer overlooked the periodical room, where the foreign minis-
ters' table was located. Narrow slots, reminiscent of gun wells in old
forts, allowed the translators sitting on the mezzanine to see the foreign
ministers below, and the walls hid cameras, computers, and communica-
tion equipment. The assistant sherpas sat at four regular library tables
forming a square in the middle of which was the round table for the
foreign ministers. The periodicals that normally stood on the visible book
shelves were replaced with handsome bound sets of British Parliamentary
Papers, the Congressional Record, and similar large volumes that gave
the room a scholarly yet governmental tone. Temporary blinds about
eight feet high were installed in the ample windows of the room, on the
east and south sides of the library overlooking both Lovett Hall and Baker

College, to guarantee privacy and security.

In this room also, as well as in the corridor just to its west,
were placed paintings, sofas, tables, plants — giving the whole a look
emphatically unlibrary-like. The offices on the northern side of the library
that normally house the Computer and Information Technology Institute
were emptied of their regular furniture and books, then redecorated with
more attractive furniture, leather-bound books, and paintings, and pro-
vided as temporary offices for the foreign and finance ministers of the
various delegations.

The main plenary meetings of the summit, with the heads of
delegations, the foreign ministers, and the finance ministers — twenty-four
in all — sitting at one magnificent table forty feet long and ten feet wide,
were held in the O'Connor Reading Room of Herring Hall. These full
plenary meetings occurred Tuesday morning and afternoon and Wednes-
day morning, so most of the official work of the summit took place in

Herring Hall. As with Lovett Hall, eight holding rooms (all elegantly
refurnished) had to be provided for the heads of delegations, and sufficient
office space provided for other working delegates and advisers. Here too
the holding rooms had to be made more or less equal in size and level of
opulence, though they ranged in dimension from that of President Bush
down to that of President Jacques Delors, the lowest-ranking head of a
delegation according to protocol. President Bush's spacious holding room
was constructed within a large classroom, with temporary walls to hide a
blackboard and other temporary walls to hide lockers in a hallway.

Additional holding rooms were provided by removing the
stepped theater seating from several large classrooms, leveling the floors,
then constructing partitions down the middle to make equivalent rooms.
The walls, though temporary, were complete with chair rails to comple-
ment existing finishes; and the resulting rooms were handsomely deco-
rated with carpeting, beautiful furnishings including desks, sofas, tables,

books, desk accessories, and various paintings and knickknacks. When
government summit planners realized that someone might look out a
window and see the loading dock at Wiess College, jackhammers were
brought in to take out the objectionable concrete, a standard Rice pea-
gravel sidewalk was installed, dirt filled in the former driveway, sod and
azaleas were planted, and the loading dock area was walled in and painted.
What had been a utilitarian area became for a short time, Cinderella-like,
an attractive swath of grass and shrubbery. All these temporary changes
were at government expense, with everything returned to the pre-summit
status quo by the time classes began in late August.

Perhaps the most elaborate changes were made to the
O'Connor Reading Room. Because it normally houses the business
library, a small circulation desk and several offices for reader services
flank the entrance. Summit planners deemed this aura of a library inap-
propriate for a diplomatic meeting, so walls were erected to shield these
areas from view. The O'Connor Room itself was considered too long, so
a new wall that reached all the way to the vaulted ceiling was installed.
As with the temporary walls in all the buildings, this wall too was held in
place by pressure bolts, with foam cushioning so the permanent carpets
and ceilings would not be disturbed. High up on the new wall of the
reading room the PDR architects positioned a relief map of the world,
attractively backlit in blue. Again flags of the participating nations hung
from the stenciled ceiling. Sherpa work stations were positioned in the
alcoves surrounding the room — all 10,000 books had been boxed up and
removed from the library.

But the centerpiece of the room was the huge table, designed,
as were all the plenary tables, by Wayne Braun of PDR. This was the
most spectacular table of all. The center of the long oval top was of curly
maple, a rare pattern favored by early American furniture makers. This
particular maple came from a tree cut in Michigan in 1962; for twenty-
eight years the craftsmen at Brochsteins Inc. had held this extraordinary

veneer, waiting for a special use. The edge of the table was made of
cherry, cut from a century-old tree in Pennsylvania, with the grain radiat-
ing outward from the center of the table. The table with its steel frame and
weight of almost 4,500 pounds took over 2,300 man-hours to design and
construct. This table, costing $175,000, was donated to the State Depart-
ment by PDR; the other three tables, made with the same veneers and
costing a total of $314,500, were later offered for sale.

These, of course, are not ordinary tables. Each has a built-in .
microphone for every delegate, a plug for eaiphones to hear the interpret-
ers, and a volume control. The tables are round in shape to ensure equality
of seating arrangement — no one would sit at the head of the table. Ac-
cording to the architectural firm, the shape also symbolizes a "closed
circle of cooperation wherein all members play an important role in
keeping the community whole and intact." The tables symbolize, too, the
care and enormous attention to detail that marked every aspect of the 1990
Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations. This was, in every respect, a
world class event, and the rooms at Rice were brought up to a standard of
sumptuousness inappropriate for academic uses but expected abroad for
meetings of the highest government officials.

Lesser changes occurred in preparing holding rooms in
Lovett Hall, in decorating the lobby outside the Sewall Hall Art Gallery
(where members of the visiting delegations and their spouses would wait
before the opening ceremonies), and in the Faculty Club, where the heads
of delegations would assemble when they first arrived at Rice and where
they would have a working lunch on Tuesday. Asset Inventory Systems
was contracted to keep track of all the Rice furnishings that were moved
out and all the new furnishings moved in. In all, a total of 750 items was
loaned by 43 sources — furniture showrooms, the Decorative Center, and
major corporate offices. For days Cotton Moving and Storage trucks and
moving personnel scurried about the campus, moving furniture in and out
of buildings. These expenses, too, were met by the federal government.

Rice faculty and staff handled the inconvenience with a minimum of
complaints; after all, even President Rupp had to move out of his office
and into temporary quarters in Brown College for several weeks. Presi-
dent Rupp's desk — originally President Lovett's desk — proved too big to
move out of the office, so it had to remain. The faculty and staff of the
Jones School and the Computer Information and Technology Institute —
who were completely moved out of their quarters for weeks— were
extraordinarily cooperative; they coped with extensive disruption with
grace and good humor.

To a casual observer much of this preparation and renovation
seemed excessive. Summit officials explained that however democratic
American expectations are, foreign government officials expect a level of
accommodation far in excess of what one finds in even the most richly

appointed rooms on a university campus. The approximately 600 linear
feet of hew walls were also not all simply for decoration; they necessarily
concealed interpreters, closed-circuit television cameras, computers,
communication equipment, and technicians to monitor the equipment.
Drew Patton of PDR and the interior decorators — directed by Angie
Patton — sought to change the academic ambience at Rice to one resem-
bling the "west wing of the White House"; taking their cues from summit
planners, the architects' task was not merely to create an image but rather
to meet a requirement for diplomatic interchange. As one summit
spokesman from Washington put it, "If you think this is excessive, you
should have seen what the French did at Versailles." The federal govern-
ment proved quite successful in getting many items and services donated,
thus limiting the total cost of the summit to taxpayers. Most Rice ex-
penses went toward permanent improvements to the campus and were
substantially underwritten by contributions. Almost all the non-capital-
improvement costs to Rice were incurred on behalf of several educational
components — a lecture series, a symposium, curricular materials, student
journalism — that proved a valuable complement to the summit.

A less obvious kind of preparation involved the proper protocol, the
etiquette of diplomacy. Formal diplomatic meetings between
representatives of sovereign nations are arranged exactly accord-
ing to protocol, which governs every detail down to who arrives in
what order (by the rank of office and the length of service in a particular
office), the precise angle by which the flags are dipped when the nations
are being identified at the opening ceremonies, making sure all the flags
are the right shape and hung properly (in the right order and not upside
down or backwards) at every occasion, and determining how the leaders
are to be saluted. They were to receive a 2 1 -gun salute, the guns being
four 75 millimeter towed howitzers mounted on 105 millimeter carriages
dating from the Second World War. The howitzers, firing one-half pound
powder blanks, were flown in on C-140s from Washington for the summit
and positioned in the Faculty Club parking lot.

Not every protocol issue was easy to resolve. There was
spirited discussion even among the American officials over whether the
red carpet leading from the Sallyport to the reviewing stand was exactly
the proper shade of red. Was it wide enough? Was it acceptable for
several of the heads of delegations to walk on the bare sidewalk, and for
one actually to walk on the grass? The answers to all were finally yes.
Small decisions became not only contentious but important for those
involved.

Because it is traditional and diplomatically appropriate, that is
to say, required by protocol, four hundred members of the military honor
guard were flown to Houston from Washington, D. C. (where they regu-
larly meet dignitaries on the White House lawn), boarded at Will Rice,
Lovett, and Baker colleges, and asked to perform their ceremonial
display of colors and precision marching in the academic quadrangle
between the statue of William Marsh Rice and the president's reviewing
stand. One hundred and fifty feet of hedges had been carefully removed
to create a temporary parade ground, and exterminators had previously

sprayed that and certain other portions of the campus to eliminate ants and
other unwelcome insects. One group of the color guard was dressed as
colonial militiamen, and their fifes and drums recalled the 1 983 American
summit meeting in Colonial Williamsburg. But this martial aspect of the
arrival ceremonies was de rigueur protocol, not a demonstration of mili-
tary might.

Though to a layperson protocol may seem silly, it in fact
smooths the interrelations between important people with important egos
and, by virtue of agreed upon procedures, avoids potentially embarrassing
disagreements over such minor procedures as who first exits a room.
Joseph Reed, U. S. Chief of Protocol, the State Department, was in charge
of the protocol details of every aspect of the summit. He and other staff
persons spent hours figuratively walking through the summit schedule and
training assistants to direct the various delegates to the right meeting room
at the right moment. Stand-ins for the delegates, including several Rice
students, simulated in advance every aspect of the summit, even arriving
by limousine and being escorted through the exact schedule of events to
check the timing and facilitate the training of the handlers. Reed's brief-
ing book had each detail timed to the minute; every function, practically
every movement by President Bush, was in effect choreographed and
scripted.

No detail was left to chance, no room was left for a misstep or
an awkward moment. Short pieces of tape on the sidewalk beneath the
front entrance to the Sallyport indicated by name how the heads of delega-
tions were to enter the Sallyport and walk toward the academic quadrangle
for the "class photo." When the delegation heads first arrived individually
and then were escorted by President and Mrs. Bush through the Sallyport
and underneath the cloisters of Lovett Hall to the patio at the east end of
Sewall Hall, just at the precise location where the dignitaries stopped,
there, on the edge of the step, were four short pieces of masking tape
labeled: Mr. Bush, Mr. Guest, Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Guest. At that point the

Bushes turned and handed their guests over to Chief of Protocol Reed,
who escorted them several steps to meet Ambassador Malek, who then
walked with them to the Faculty Club as the Bushes walked back through
the Lovett Hall cloisters to await the arrival of the next head of delegation.
No one at any time ad-libbed a step or comment or pause. Even the
phrase "heads of delegations" was dictated by protocol because, techni-
cally speaking, only Presidents Bush and Mitterrand were heads of state;
the others were heads of government but not heads of state. The Queen is
the head of state: Mrs. Thatcher is the head of the government. Hence the
correct collective term for the assembled government leaders is head of
delegation.

While many might question some of the remodeling and
refurnishing that occurred on the Rice University campus, and
certain niceties of protocol seem an arcane throwback to the
age of knighthood, no one could doubt the necessity of extraor-
dinary security measures. After all, for several hours eight leaders of the
Western world would be assembled on one small reviewing stand or in
one or two meeting rooms. A would-be terrorist's dream could result in
an international nightmare. Consequently no aspect of the summit was
more carefully planned than security, and the city of Houston never before,
in its history had witnessed such elaborate precautions. Flown in for the
occasion were — accordirig to the local newspapers — approximately 400
agents of the United States Secret Service, more than 100 Special Agents
of the State Department, perhaps 300 Federal Bureau of Investigation
agents, and members of the President's Protective Agency. In addition,
1 ,500 members of the Houston Police Department were assigned to
summit activities, plus 425 Harris County deputies, and countless other
state, local, and military agents. The Secret Service headquartered in the
Ley Student Center at Rice beginning June 8; the Famsworth Room
housed their radio communications, but the only exterior indication of
what was taking place inside was a satellite dish placed on top of the
building. The Secret Service agents and the officers of the Houston Police
Department were fed in the R Room, at the south end of the football
stadium, by the Rice food service. In addition to the American personnel,
each participating nation had personnel from its own security organiza-
tions present. Marty Vest, director of the Rice Memorial Center, saw to
every need of the Secret Service men and women, and they in turn practi-
cally adopted her as an honorary member of their agency.

Not every detail of the security arrangements can be dis-
cussed even after the fact, for the various agencies — local, national, and
international — charged with the responsibility of protecting visiting heads
of delegations do not choose to reveal certain sensitive details of electronic

surveillance and dther kinds of surveillance of individuals whose prior
history made them potentially suspect. But what can be told explains
why, for several days, Rice University was the safest place in the world
for those who were authorized to be there.

Months before the summit was to begin, security personnel
began inspecting the facilities at Rice; every hotel housing delegates; the
sites of secondary summit meetings such as Bayou Bend and the Museum
of Fine Arts, where official dinners were held; the Astrodomain, site of the
pre-summit rodeo; the Brown Convention Center; Ellington Field, where
the airplanes carrying the heads of delegations landed; and each motor-
cade route. Not only were the physical facilities of the hotels checked, but
every person who might come into contact with the delegates — maids,
waiters, food preparers, clerks — was checked. Food ingredients were
inspected. Secret Service agents examined lists of tenants of buildings
that lined the various motorcade routes and performed a careful check to
see if any persons had criminal records. Several times in advance of the
summit the Secret Service agents drove the motorcade routes videotaping
every building, house, intersection, and vehicle encountered. These tapes
were reviewed to see if anything looked suspicious, and the license plates
of the vehicles were run through police computers to see if any of the
vehicles belonged to known or suspected troublemakers. Minor changes
were made in several of the routes as a result, and the exact times of
motorcades were changed many times — even slight variations during the
summit from announced schedules — to confuse potential terrorists.

Close watch was kept on several groups who were known to
be planning protests during the summit, and specific locations in Hermann
Park across from the Rice campus were designated for such protests.
Extensive police supervision was provided; members of mutually antago-
nistic groups were prevented from interfering with each other or causing
violence. The police in full riot gear at the Ku Klux Klan rally on Satur-
day afternoon preceding the summit, for example, far outnumbered the

Klansmen present. Hecklers were watched as well, with one insistent
person getting arrested. Security planners had determined that no protest
would be censored, but also that none would be allowed to get out of
hand.

All the construction at Rice. was inspected before new walls
were closed in to ensure that no explosive or listening device was hidden;
in fact, on several occasions walls had to be reopened after they were
closed because they had not been officially examined. Secret Service
agents even dismantled and put back together again the portable air
conditioning units that were concealed under the president's reviewing
stand to make certain that they contained no bombs. All the buildings on
campus were swept for bombs the Saturday before the summit opened.
Already the Secret Service, the Houston Police Department's Bomb
Squad, and the Fire Department had carefully inspected the network of
utility tunnels beneath the Rice campus. After the final sweep, many

manhole covers were tack-welded shut; those portions of the tunnels that
had entries from basements were secured with Secret Service locks. The
same was done to all the manhole covers along the various motorcade
routes. Similarly all mailboxes on the Rice campus and lining the motor-
cade routes were removed several weeks in advance so no terrorist could
plant an explosive in one or more of them.

The air space above Rice for six miles in every direction was
restricted; trauma helicopters from the Texas Medical Center were al-
lowed to fly, but not in the direction of Rice, and the traffic helicopters
that many Houston drivers depend on were grounded over much of the
city. During the summit proceedings several Black Hawk helicopters,
temporarily stationed at Ellington Field, maintained aerial surveillance of
the campus. In the case of an emergency on the campus involving summit
delegates, a rescue procedure was practiced. While two Black Hawks
circled low over the campus, two other Black Hawks with armed com-

mandoes quickly zoomed down almost to ground level to simulate a
landing between Herring Hall and the Rice Memorial Center. In the case
of a real threat, delegates would have been whisked out of the building
and to safety in a matter of minutes. Security agents were also placed atop
several Rice buildings and tall buildings in the Texas Medical Center.

Every possible contingency was considered. National
Guardsmen unloaded the delegates' luggage onto the tarmac at Ellington
Field so that bomb-sniffing dogs could inspect them. Medical planners
examined the complete medical history of each of the major participants;
specialists in every potential illness or ailment were on standby around the
clock, and several emergency rooms were also constantly ready, with all
the medical personnel having cleared a security check. Ambulances,
helicopters, and other response vehicles were on instant standby. An
ambulance was driven in each motorcade just behind the limousine, with a
second ambulance available should the first have a flat or motor trouble.

Each delegation included the personal medical doctor of the respective
head of delegation, and that doctor observed the delegate head every
moment of each plenary session via closed-circuit television without
audio. If there had been the least visible indication of a medical prob-
lem — a stroke, for example, or heart attack or choking — the monitoring
doctor was in instantaneous electronic contact with a standby physician
and emergency team at a Texas Medical Center hospital.

Security was tight at every summit related site, but nowhere
more so than the Rice campus. The Rice Campus Police had been in-
volved in security planning from the very beginning, although always in
an advisory or cooperative mode. The Secret Service, along with the
Houston Police Department, devised the security plan, but the Rice
Campus Police represented the Rice administration in making sure that all
Rice personnel understood the procedures and were inconvenienced as
little as possible. The Secret Service and HPD were, understandably, little
concerned about inconvenience; their sole purpose was to have a secure
campus for three days. The first line of that security was approximately
150 Houston police officers standing about 100 feet apart around the
entire perimeter of the campus twenty-four hours a day. The streets
ringing the campus were made one lane and one way, from Sunset Boule-
vard to Rice Boulevard to Greenbriar Avenue to University Boulevard to
Main Street. From MacGregor Boulevard (formerly Outer Loop) past the
Mecom Fountain, Main Street was completely closed to through traffic.
Police officers stood in the closed lanes; at night, temporarily improved
lighting courtesy of Houston Lighting and Power eliminated dark areas.
The police officers, with a fifteen-minute break every two hours, were on
twelve-hour shifts. Coffee and snacks were provided; the Harris County
Mosquito Control District did extra spraying in the region to provide a
measure of comfort for the foot-weary police officers. All police vaca-
tions were cancelled for the duration of the summit; as a result, even with
the concentration of personnel on summit events, more police than usual

patrolled streets throughout the remainder of the city.

Inside the police line there was a no-man's-land under close
surveillance. Then, around the perimeter of the inner area of the campus
called the Summit Security Zone — roughly from the President's House,
Lovett Hall and the academic quadrangle, to Herring Hall and the Rice
Memorial Center, extending south to include the Faculty Club and six
residential colleges (but excluding the Allen Business Center), then
reaching across most of the stadium parking lot — there was extremely
tight security by what are called uniformed Secret Service agents. For the
even more restricted area actually containing the plenary meeting rooms,
Secret Service personnel were practically hand to hand. This portion of
the campus was totally off-limits to anyone without highest security
clearance. No mail packages or packages conveyed by any vendor could
be delivered to offices or departments during the summit period; all such
deliveries had to be made to the Rice campus police office and could be
picked up at the conclusion of the summit. Even the maintenance and
custodial personnel required to be in the Summit Security Zone had to be
cleared and accompanied by Secret Service agents. It would have been
deadly business for any unauthorized person found to be in this inner
sanctum of the summit.

But as secure as the total campus was, Rice officials had
worked out in advance exacting procedures whereby necessary Rice
faculty, staff, and graduate students could come on campus to perform
essential work. Some of the most grueling negotiation with the govern-
ment about use of the Rice campus had involved Rice's insistence that
much of the work and research of the university had to continue. The
business operations of the campus continued in Allen Center; many of the
administrative employees were moved to converted dormitory rooms in
Brown College; and ongoing experiments in the laboratories had to be
tended. Sandwiches were provided in Allen Center to the personnel there,
while Sammy's (the campus snack bar) was relocated to the Brown

College Commons for the duration of the summit. A complicated
credentialing procedure was employed to control entry to the campus.
Everyone who had a legitimate reason to be on campus during the summit
period submitted his or her name to the Rice Summit Office. This master
list was then processed by the Rice Campus Police. Automobile tags (to
be hung from the interior windshield mirror) were sent to the relevant
personnel; this displayed tag allowed a person to enter the campus at one
of three specified locations.

Once on campus, a barricade of concrete trash barrels re-

■ quired anyone driving to stop. Police and military personnel checked the
trunk and interior of the car for weapons or bombs. Then one went to the
credentials desk, manned by members of the Rice Campus Police, under
an adjacent tent. One's name was checked against the master credential
list; once the name was located, one handed in his or her regular Rice
identification card and was handed in return an official security badge that
allowed one access to what was labeled "the outer perimeter." After
clipping this badge to one's clothings one walked through a magnetometer
(a metal detector similar to those used at airports) operated by Secret

. Service personnel. Then one could go to those portions of the campus not
labeled a Summit Security Zone, which, as described before, consisted of
most of the campus except for the Allen Center and the laboratories and
colleges north of Laboratory Road — the road between the Chemistry
Building and the library. One could not casually walk across campus
from, say, the M. D. Anderson Biological Laboratories to Allen Center.
Obviously, campus life was disrupted, but given what might have been,
the educational life of the university continued to a remarkable degree
during summit activities.

Precisely because it is first and foremost an educational institution.
Rice sought in a variety of ways to educate the larger community
about summitry in general and the international issues and oppor-
tunities facing this summit in particular. Beginning on March 26,
1 990, and continuing for seven Monday evenings, the Office of Continu-
ing Studies offered a course entitled "A Global View of the Economic
Summit." Utilizing the expertise primarily of professors of political
science, economics, and history, the classes gave a broad overview of the
historical, political, and economic issues that could be expected to be at
the forefront of discussion at the Houston summit and examined the
record of past summits, economic and otherwise.

Carl MacDowell, for example, head of Rice's summit office,
described the 1983 Williamsburg summit and previewed preparations at
Rice. Historian Francis Loewenheim gave a historical sketch of presiden-
tial participation in summits from Woodrow Wilson at Versailles follow-
ing World War I to George Bush at the 1989 economic summit at
Versailles. Political scientist Richard Stoll put the upcoming summit in
the context of changing global politics; economist Gordon Smith analyzed
the international economic issues of the day; political scientist Fred von
der Mehden described the so-called economic challenge of Japan and
other newly industrialized Asian countries; and political scientist John
Ambler discussed the European Common Market. Extremely popular,
the course attracted an audience of several hundred. The series was also
videotaped by the public access television station and broadcast several
times before and during the 1990 summit.

But of course adults were not the only Houstonians interested
in the summit. Schoolteachers in the metropolitan area saw the event as a
perfect occasion to teach students about the peoples and cultures of
various nations. To facilitate this educational goal. Rice's education
department, chaired by Linda M. McNeil, working with several volunteers
and four teachers from the Houston Independent School District, prepared

a packet of curricular materials intended for a three- to five-day set of
lessons. The lesson plans, designed for third through tenth grade students,
emphasized geography, economics, basic information about the summit,
and the languages of the participating nations. The materials included
maps, flags to color, a summit vocabulary, and other items designed to
enhance students' understanding of the event that would surely dominate
their city in midsummer. The curricular materials were distributed both to
HISD and to suburban schools.

At the other end of the academic spectrum, the Rice Institute
for Policy Analysis sponsored a series of public forums on international
defense policy and economics. The Rice forums, partially underwritten by
grants from Pennzoil Company and the Hobby Foundation, brought
together eight of the world's leading authorities on international affairs to
identify and address some of the major issues that the summit participants
would have to confront. The forum began on Wednesday, June 27, with a
luncheon during which Masamichi Hanabusa, consul general of Japan in
New York, spoke on "Japanese Aid to the Third World: Problems and
Impacts for U. S. -Japan Relations." That evening the forum hosted a
panel discussion on the topic "Debt, Trade, and Investment: How to Build
a Secure Economic Future." The three panelists brought a wide range of
expertise to focus on issues: Donald T. Regan, former U. S. secretary of
treasury and White House chief of staff; Andreas A. M. van Agt, ambassa-
dor of the European Economic Community to the United States; and
Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Harvard wunderkind of international economics who
has helped design the economic programs of Bolivia, Poland, and Yugo-
slavia.

The second day of the forum, which was directed by Joseph
Cooper of the Rice Institute for Policy Analysis and held in the Grand Hall
of the Rice Memorial Center, began with a luncheon address entitled "A
New U. S. Policy Concept" by Paul H. Nitze, who has had a distinguished
fifty-year career of advising presidents and served as a member of the U. S.

delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and the more
recent Arms Control Talks at Geneva. The forum closed that evening

\ ith another stimulating panel discussion on the question, "The End of the
Bi-Polar World?" The three panelists were Harold Brown, who was
Jimmy Carter's secretary of defense; Andre L. Y. Giraud, from 1986 to
1988 the French secretary of defense; and Denis W. Healy, a prominent
Labour Party member of the British Parliament since 1952 and secretary
of state for defense from 1964 to 1979. Sponsoring such high-level
discussion of important policy issues in a forum open to the Houston
public has been a Rice practice since its founding, and the Rice Institute
for Policy Analysis appropriately contributed to that tradition.

Another educational project perfectly suited for the occasion
was the brainchild of the editors of the Thresher, Rice's student newspa-
per. Wouldn't it be great. Jay Yates and Kurt Moeller, editors in chief,

nused in the late spring, if a group of student editors from other colleges
and universities could come to Houston, work with the Thresher editors,
and jointly cover the summit. Yates and Moeller took their idea to Presi-
dent George Rupp, who instantly saw the unique educational opportunity
and agreed to fund it. After further discussion the proposal was refined to
include inviting student editors from the six foreign nations represented at
the summit. Consequently sixteen student journalists were chosen — one
each from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United King-
dom, and ten from representative U. S. colleges and universities: Berke-
ley, Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, Harvard, Notre Dame, Swarthmore, and
the University of Houston, University of Miami, University of Michigan,
and Washington University. Rice paid their airfare and provided free
room and board and office space.

The visiting student journalists, along with a contingent of
regular Thresher staff members, were provided summit press credentials.
John Davenport, a local television news director, conducted a pre-summit
press seminar for the students. President Rupp sponsored a reception for

the student journalists in the Rice Faculty Club on Friday evening, July 6,
with many of the regular working press invited to visit with the student
journalists. The special summit Thresher staff put out three issues of the
Thresher on July 9, 10, and 11. Each visiting student journalist wrote at
least one byline article; each foreign student was asked to cover his or her
nation's delegation and to prepare background material on the particular
issues facing that nation. All articles and editorials were written in En-
glish. The entire project was a resounding success; the students learned a
great deal and relished the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and the
Thresher issues, distributed at the Brown Convention Center, were a hit
with the working journalists. One could see members of the press
throughout the Brown Center reading the work of the students, and ABC's
"Good Morning America" interviewed three of them on its Tuesday
broadcast. The point, once again, was that even in the midst of an interna-
tional summit and a circus of press activity. Rice seized the opportunity to
provide an educational experience for some thirty-four able young student
journalists.

From the first indication that the 1990 Economic Summit of Indus-
trialized Nations might possibly come to Houston and, indeed, to
Rice University, Rice officials were quick to offer the campus for
two very different but interrelated reasons. First, as President
Rupp said on many occasions, it was an honor for Rice to participate in a
major historic event, albeit as the stage set and the prop manager; and
second, the enormous media attention that would focus on Rice as the site
of the summit offered a wonderful occasion to make the many merits of
the university better known to a local, national, and international audience.
But to ensure that Rice realized the potential benefits of this press expo-
sure would require as careful planning as the other aspects of the summit.
Though government officials would take care that Rice would be suitably
prepared as the stage for the summit, Rice itself would have to see to
the public relations preparations. That effort began in early December
1989, as soon as it seemed clear that the summit would take place on the
campus.

Among the first tasks of the Rice Summit Project Group,
coordinated by Carl MacDowell, was to organize a Rice Summit Office,
located in the Graduate House. Lou Ann Moore was named project
director of university operations to help MacDowell manage the myriad
of activities that would take place on campus. Jane Lowery was hired as
project director of community relations and charged with the task of
helping to formulate a media plan. Cris Pena became the administrative
assistant of the summit office. On January 26, 1990, President Rupp
announced the organization of a task force charged with the responsibility
of facilitating summit activities on campus. The task force consisted of
individuals directly responsible for certain functions (Marion Hicks, food
and housing; Dow Hudlow, accounting; Tom Moffett, facilities and
communication; Bill Noblitt, publicity and media relations; Mary
Voswinkel, security; Jim Williamson, scheduling) and others who repre-
sented vital constituencies (Allen Matusow, faculty; Spencer Yu, under-

graduates; Robert Schmunk, graduate students). This committee worked
closely with Lou Ann Moore and Jane Lowery. Once the scope of Rice's
media and public relations opportunities became evident, Jane Lowery's
responsibilities expanded and her office was moved to the Allen Business
Center. Lowery also coordinated the activities of Rice volunteers, of
whom there were many more than there were meaningful jobs to perform.
Often times instantly available, campus-wise Rice students' were the most
appropriate volunteers to use, but everyone was thanked, warned of the
relative lack of opportunities for service, and occasionally sent to the
South Main Civic Association to have duties assigned. Most volunteers,
however, were essentially held in abeyance on the outside chance that
some enormous need might develop at the last moment. Actually at the
end the government poured in resources and personnel. Still, many
dedicated volunteers did put in long hours that significantly contributed to
the success of the summit at Rice. And at practically the last moment, a
number of Rice student volunteers were hired either by one of several
U. S. government agencies or by the various television networks and news
organizations to perform a wide range of tasks that required a familiarity
with the Rice campus.

A media task force consisting of President Rupp, Provost Neal
Lane, Vice-President Dean Currie, Dean Mary Mclntire, and Carl
MacDowell was constituted and met regularly to direct Rice's effort to
present itself to a larger public in a way consistent with the university's
tradition of understated excellence. Vice-President Currie was given
overall responsibility for managing the media and public relations pro-
gram, working with Jane Lowery and the University Relations office. By
late February a wide-ranging public relations effort was underway, with
Rice staff members Kathie Krause and Scott Andrews working with local
media and national media respectively. Recognizing both that the summit
activities would require a public relations effort greater than the slightly
expanded staff at Rice could handle and that it would be helpful to have

the benefit of a company experienced in national media relations, Rice
employed the firm of Fleishman-Hillard — which had a principal who had
been actively involved as a White House staffer in a previous economic
summit — to help with contacting the national media.

The Rice summit office quickly got underway a variety of
public relations projects to educate the media and, through them, the larger
public, about the character of the university serving as the summit host.
Fleishman-Hillard sent letters suggesting story angles about Rice to a
number of national editors, with follow-up calls by a Fleishman-Hillard
representative. Fleishman-Hillard also arranged a series of appointments
for President Rupp with the editors of such publications as the Wall Street
Journal, U. S. A. Today, and U. S. News and World Report in Washington
and New York, which gave him an opportunity to discuss the merits of
Rice University in the context of American higher education in general.
No instant "story" on Rice was really anticipated; rather, the idea was
subtly to raise the consciousness of the editors about Rice. Perhaps
articles on or mentions of Rice would result in the months ahead. A series
of media dinners was organized in Houston, to which a number of local
journalists and bureau chiefs were invited to have dinner at the home of
President and Mrs. Rupp and meet with a small group of representative
Rice faculty and administrators. No hard sell was ever intended; the idea
was that the Rice story, once understood, sold itself. Journalists were
expected to interview some spokespeople, so Fleishman-Hillard experts
provided a training session for administrators and faculty on how to
communicate effectively when being interviewed.

Work proceeded also on a carefully designed press packet to
be distributed to several hundred selected journalists who would be in
Houston to report the summit. This packet — primarily developed by Scott
Andrews and later praised by a veteran of the Los Angeles Times as one of
the best he had seen — assembled in a gray folder with the Rice seal
handsomely embossed on the cover, consisted of five pages of concise

information on "Rice University: An Introduction," "Rice University: A
Brief History," "Rice University by the Numbers" (enrollment, average
SAT scores, number of faculty, size of endowment, etc.), "Student Life at
Rice," and "George Erik Rupp, President of Rice University"; a reproduc-
tion of the U. S. News and World Report ranking of Rice as the tenth best
national university, with the ranking highlighted; photographs of Lovett
Hall and President Rupp; a color map of the campus; a copy of the 1989
Report of the President; and a specially written, color-illustrated booklet
entitled Rice University: Setting the Standard that very effectively outlined
the history and development of Rice and communicated its character and
ethos. This booklet was authored by Jeff Cruikshank; his editorial com-
pany also took the photographs and designed the publication. All the
materials in the packet, including the booklet, were meticulously re-
viewed by Rice's media task force and a special faculty editorial commit-
tee consisting of John B. Boles and William Martin and chaired by Dean
Mclntire.

Several special services were provided for both print media
and television. High quality photographs of Lovett Hall were available for
use by print journalists. Because no students would be on campus during
the summit, the major television networks were invited to film campus
scenes before the spring semester ended. NBC's "Today" show, for
example, which during the summit broadcast an interview with the Coun-
cil for the Advancement and Support of Education's "Professor of the
Year" Dennis Huston, earlier filmed him in a classroom setting for use
during the live interview. Rice contracted with Channel 2 locally to take
aerial video shots of the campus and the particular buildings housing the
plenary meetings on a sunny day. This video was offered to national and
international networks as so-called B-Roll, the kind of visual backdrop
over which the announcer's voice communicates the story. No aerial
views would, of course, be possible during the actual summit, and the
weather could be bad several days before the summit. So "perfect" video

shots were prepared in advance. Cannata Communications Corporation
also prepared a video that showed campus scenes, suggested the nature of
the university, described the Rice Student Volunteer Program (RSVP),
and concluded with brief interviews with a sampling of Rice professors.
Kathie Krause and Scott Andrews of Rice's University Relations office
also conducted dozens of media tours of the campus in advance of the
summit. Never had so many' journalists from so many nations reported on
the beauty and quality of the university.

It was recognized at the very onset of summit media planning
that with a multitude of opportunities to tell about Rice, some coordination
of the message was necessary. A myriad of messages with wildly differ-
ing emphases could fuzz the image and confound the communication. A
great deal of thought went into developing what came to be called, some-
what self-consciously, the "core message." In President Rupp's words,"
"We are the model for what higher education at its best can be." That

model is the combination of the best qualities of a major research univer-
sity and an intimate liberal arts college, where very able students are
taught by accomplished professors in small classes. The message was
elaborated on by discussing the college and honor system, the develop-
ment and enhancement of a number of interdisciplinary research centers
and institutes, and the financial accessibility of a Rice education made
possible by the university's munificent endowment. Rice has long been a
gem of American higher education too little recognized outside the South-
west; the summit publicity allowed an opportunity to make its stellar
qualities better known nationally and internationally.

For the same reason that the Houston Host Committee sought
via the hospitality offered at the Brown Convention Center to cultivate the
media, Rice too sought in a variety of venues to promote its story. Volun-
teer Tom Smith, Rice alumnus and member of its board of governors,
working with Jane Lowery and a large number of fellow alumni, staffed a

Media Hospitality Center in the R Room at Rice Stadium for more than
three weeks in advance of the summit. Refreshments, a chance to relax,
printed material on Rice University, a video presentation, and a high-tech
HyperCard information system utilizing Macintosh computers with data
and visuals on Rice, Houston, and Texas in part prepared by Rice student
and staff volunteers was available in the R Room. Similarly furnished
hospitality suites were provided in the three downtown hotels housing
most of the visiting journalists. Rice alumni volunteers — coordinated by
Patti Lewis Everett — welcomed the media at the Hyatt Hotel, the Four
Seasons, and the Doubletree with a complimentary continental breakfast,
snacks for lunch and after dinner, and a complimentary bar. The Rice core
message was dispensed along with the edibles.

A sleek information booth, designed by Jeff Cox of Rice's
Office of University Relations, was installed in the Brown Convention
Center and staffed throughout the summit activities by a group of volun-

teers supervised by Tom Smith. Here too the press packet, the video, and
the HyperCard system were on display; volunteers stood ready to answer
questions about Rice; and a group of faculty and staff fluent in French,
German, Italian, and Japanese were available to discuss Rice with journal-
ists in their native tongue. Rice mementos — T-shirts, reporter's note-
books featuring the Rice seal, Rice lapel pins, small Rice Owls for charm
bracelets (also perfect for the chain holding the regulation media IDs that
had to be worn to gain entry to the Brown Center) — were also immensely
popular with the visiting journalists, many of whom turned out to be
souvenir hounds: "I'll trade you a CBS pin for a Rice pin" or "I'll give
you an NBC cap for a Rice T-shirt" was often heard near the Rice booth.
Parenthetically, when the delegation staff and even Secret Service staff left
the Rice campus on the final day of the summit, they removed the summit
signage bearing the official logos from the walls and took them for
mementos.

The Rice Information and Communication Exchange, a
library reference service provided to corporations on a fee basis by Rice's
Fondren Library, in cooperation with librarians at other area universities
and institutions, operated a free information reference center on the third
floor of the Brown Center at the entrance to the press filing room. Super-
vised by Una Gourlay of R. I. C. E. and Sherry Adams, head librarian of
the Houston Chronicle, the reference center provided a variety of com-
puter data bank information services to journalists. If a reporter needed
background information to complete a story, the trained librarians were
able via their data banks to answer practically any information question.
The idea, appreciated by the visiting reporters, was to assist those trying to
file an accurate story while faced with pressing deadlines.

Japanese reporters and television networks covered the summit
more aggressively than those of any other foreign nation, so it was
appropriate that Prime Minister and Mrs. Toshiki Kaifu were the
first to arrive in Houston. Their airplane landed at Ellington Air
Field — formerly an aviation training field built on the eve of
World War II — at 4:30 P. M. Friday, and, as would the other arrivals at
Ellington, taxied to a stop at a red carpet laid out in front of the Base
Operations Building of the Air National Guard Base located there. In a
procedure repeated six times, first representatives of the U. S. Immigration
and Naturalization Service and U. S. Customs boarded the plane. Once
they had completed their responsibilities, the visiting nation's staff mem-
bers exited the airplane. Then a U. S. protocol representative (and, on
most occasions, that nation's ambassador to the U. S.) boarded the plane
and accompanied the head of delegation, spouse, and official party down
the steps to a series of "arrival greeters." Finally the protocol representa-
tive escorted each head of delegation and spouse through a military cordon
of troops to an awaiting helicopter for a brief, traffic-hopping trip to the
hotel. President and Mrs. Bush arrived at Ellington later that evening at
6:50 P. M. with appropriate fanfare.

The Friday arrival ceremonies heralded the excitement that
was to reign in Houston for almost a week. (Saturday afternoon Bush and
Kaifu had a private pre-summit meeting at The Houstonian, Bush's local
home.) The Royal Air Force jet carrying Prime Minister and Mr.
Thatcher touched down on the tarmac of Ellington at 5:50 P. M. Saturday
evening. Later, at 7:00 P. M., Prime Minister and Mrs. Brian Mulroney
of Canada landed at Ellington, and President Jacques Delors of the Euro-
pean Economic Community came in Sunday afternoon, 2:25 P. M., at
Houston Intercontinental Airport, the only head of delegation to utilize a
commercial airport and the only one to travel from the airport to his hotel
via motorcade.

Meanwhile, back at the Astroarena, the Texas-style barbecue

for members of the press and for the earlier-arriving dignitaries had
already begun. Later that evening, at 6:45, the heads of five delegations
and their parties had joined President and Mrs. Bush for front-row seats to
watch a specially staged 45-minute rodeo. Following the rodeo was a 45-
minute abbreviated show presented by the Grand Ole Opry. While the
visitors were witnessing a part of what visitors expect to see in Texas,
frantic last-minute preparations were underway elsewhere in Houston.

The Brown Convention Center was a beehive of activity as
journalists scrambled to get acclimated, the Rice campus was already a
totally secure zone, work was ongoing at the University of Houston
preparing for the "Thank You, Houston" party that would be President
and Mrs. Bush's final summit appearance, and physical plant craftsmen at
Rice were feverishly working to build a canopy over the president's
reviewing stand that had just been requested several hours earlier. A
number of Houston religious communities held special worship services to '
offer prayers for the summit; a citywide ecumenical Service of Prayer for
Economic Peace and Justice was held at Christ the King Lutheran Church,
adjacent to the Rice campus, with Houston city controller George C.
Greanias the featured speaker.

Several hours later West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl,
Prime Minister and Mrs, Giulio Andreotti of Italy, and President and Mrs.
Franccois Mitterrand of France were boarding airplanes in their respective
nations preparing to fly across the Atlantic. Kohl had been scheduled to
arrive Sunday afternoon but delayed his flight to watch his nation win the
World Cup; consequently he arrived at Ellington Field at 5:05 A. M.
Monday morning. Prime Minister Andreotti, whose nation had hosted the
World Cup games, delayed coming until the championship was decided,
and President Mitterrand, second to President Bush in the rankings of
protocol, arrived last as protocol dictated. Early on Monday morning,
5:15 A. M. Houston time, the Italian plane landed at Ellington, and four
hours later President and Mrs. Mitterrand arrived aboard a graceful Air

France Concorde. Now the cast was complete. Five of the dignitaries had
Sunday to rest (the Bushes and Thatchers attended church), recover from
any effects of jet lag, and prepare themselves for the meetings that would
begin on Monday, July 9.

The arrival of President and Mrs. Bush at curbside, in front of
Lovett Hall, on Monday afternoon at 12:30 P. M. to formally open the
1 990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations included a brief cer-
emony rich in symbolic meaning for all friends of Rice University. The
1912 opening of Rice had featured an international convocation of schol-
ars, whose papers delivered and read both celebrated the state of scholar-
ship in the world and announced a new member to the fraternity of institu-
tions of higher education. The papers read at the Opening Ceremonies
were collected in three magnificent volumes, the Book of the Opening, and
inscribed to then President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. Just
five years earlier Wilson as president of Princeton University had ■

suggested a young Princeton mathematician, Edgar Odell Lovett, to the
Board of Trustees of the Rice Institute for consideration as the Institute's
first president. The Trustees of course chose Lovett; he delivered a
memorable address at the opening entitled "The Meaning of the New
Institution," and went on to outline his vision for Rice that has since
guided the university's development. Now, seventy-eight years after that
original intellectual summit at Rice, another great summit was about to
commence on the campus. Arrangements had already been made to
present President Bush with an inscribed set of the Book of the Opening.
President and Mrs. George Rupp and members of the Rice Board of
Trustees greeted President and Mrs. Bush as they stepped out of their
limousine in front of Lovett Hall and symbolically handed over the
campus. President Bush graciously accepted the offer, shook everyone's
hand, and proceeded to open the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized
Nations, the first ever held at a university.

Beginning at 1 2:46 P. M., and arriving every seven minutes via
motorcade up the long tree-arched allee from the main entrance at Rice to
the front of Lovett Hall came the seven heads of delegations in reverse
protocol order: President Delors, Prime Minister Kaifu, Prime Minister
Andreotti, Prime Minister Mulroney, Chancellor Kohl, Prime Minister
Thatcher, and President Mitterrand. President and Mrs. Bush met each of
them at curbside, escorted them through the Sallyport, and walked with
them through the cloisters of Lovett Hall toward the plaza before the east
side of Sewall Hall. There, after posing momentarily for pictures, Chief of
Protocol Joseph Reed and Ambassador Malek walked the successively
arriving guests to the Faculty Club. As the Bushes walked back toward
the Sallyport awaiting the next arrival, other arriving dignitaries rested and
conversed in the Sewall Art Gallery, where a special exhibition of NASA
photographs of the earth — loaned for the occasion by the law firm of
Fulbright & Jaworski and curated by Michael Henderson — suggested the

common purpose of all the delegates.

Shortly after all the delegations had arrived, the spouses and
the ministers of foreign affairs and finance assembled on a reviewing
stand under a tent canopy in the inner quadrangle. At approximately 2:05
P. M. President Bush and the heads of delegations began walking from the
Faculty Club, around the front of Lovett Hall, toward the Sallyport. Just
before 2:10 the heads of delegations entered the east side of the Sallyport,
paused momentarily as each looked down at the tape and got into his or
her preassigned position, then started walking, eight abreast — from left to
right, Jacques Delors, Giulio Andreotti, Helmut Kohl, Francois
Mitterrand, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney, and
Toshiki Kaifu — through the Sallyport into the academic quadrangle. The
festive blasts of trumpets and the booming of a 2 1 -gun salute announced
the occasion. The arrival ceremonies had begun. Months earlier this
ceremony had beeVi planned to be several hours long, but in June President

Bush, remembering what a July afternoon was like in Houston, drastically
abbreviated the ritual to only eight minutes.

The traditional red carpet led from the Sallyport to the air-
conditioned, roofed reviewing stand, and rumors indicated that Mrs.
Thatcher had had lead weights sewn into the hem of her dress to keep it
from billowing as she and the others stood on the stand with cooling air
blowing up from beneath. The U. S. Marine Band played the stirring
anthems of the participating nations. The U. S. Fife and Drum Corps of
the Third Infantry paraded in colonial splendor before the international
guests, while honor guards from all branches of the U. S. military stood at
brisk attention. Color guards bearing the flags of the seven nations and the
European Economic Community were positioned on both sides of the
reviewing stand. Following the shortened display. President Bush wel-
comed his guests with very brief remarks. "So let us begin, in good faith,"
he said, squinting into the sun, "to set the stage for the new millennium."
He referred to the recent remarkable changes in Europe, then urged his
fellow leaders of the industrial democracies to "work toward decisions
here in Houston that will bring new stability and prosperity to the world."

Within minutes of the conclusion of President Bush's re-
marks, the heads of delegations were walking back toward Lovett Hall,
where they rested briefly in their respective holding rooms. Then at 3:00
P. M. the eight heads of delegations assembled in the Founders' Room of
Lovett Hall for the first plenary meetings. Pool reporters and journalists
visited the room as the heads of delegations entered and found their seats;
then the press left and the most private of all the plenary sessions began.
At the opposite end of the academic quadrangle the ministers of foreign
affairs were assembling at that very moment in the Elder Periodical Room
of Fondren Library and the ministers of finance were beginning their
meeting in the Wright Reference Room of Fondren. The business of the
1990 Economic Summit had commenced. Not quite two hours later — the
sessions cut short in deference to those who had arrived only that morning

after long transatlantic flights — the eight heads of delegations exited the
Founders' Room, descended the steps, and walked from the Sallyport
toward the president's reviewing stand, stopping just short of it. There the
leaders stood at a prearranged location in front of the glorious, sun-
drenched west facade of Lovett Hall; this was to be the site of one of two
official "class photos." Ten minutes later the Monday session was over;
the heads of delegations returned to their holding rooms and, in reverse
protocol order, departed the Rice campus for their respective hotels.

Monday evening the various members of the delegations had
working dinners at several Houston locations. Secretary of State James A.
Baker hosted a dinner for the foreign ministers at Tony's Restaurant; the
ministers of finance working dinner took place at the Wortham House, the
South Boulevard home of the chancellor of the University of Houston
System, and the sherpas and political directors participated in a working
dinner in the Massachusetts Room of the Bayou Bend Collection. The
heads of delegations held their working dinner in the Dining Room of the
Bayou Bend Collection, arriving in two-minute intervals after 7:00 P. M.
at the stately, 28-room "Latin Colonial" mansion designed by John F.
Staub and built in 1 927 for Miss Ima Hogg and her two brothers, Mike
and Will Hogg. Miss Hogg accumulated one of the nation's premier
collections of American antiques — furniture, paintings, glassware — and
now her home and collection are part of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Arriving via the Lazy Lane entrance, the heads of delegations
were met in the beautifully landscaped south gardens by President Bush
(Mrs. Bush was hosting another elegant dinner for the spouses of the
delegates at the private Buffalo Bayou mansion of old friends Hugh and
Betty Liedtke). Following a short stroll through part of the fourteen acres
of grounds, the heads of state lined up at approximately 7:25 P. M. on the
north lawn of Bayou Bend, with its columned facade as a backdrop, for
their second "class photo." After posing good-naturedly, with friendly
comments about Houston's warm weather and hospitality, the eight

entered Bayou Bend's formal drawing room for drinks, a reloeated Gilbert
Stuart painting of John Vaughan creating the proper atmosphere. Then the
guests sat for dinner in the intimate dining room, two French porcelain
vases depicting Washington and John Adams on a nearby table. The
menu — tortilla soup with com bread sticks, grilled Gulf of Mexico red
snapper as the entree, and dessert of blackberry peach swirl ice cream,
sliced peaches, and cookies — was Texan in flavor served in a colonial
American setting. After the finish of the working dinner the delegations
lingered beyond the scheduled time to look in appreciation at the spectacu-
lar holdings of Bayou Bend, then left in protocol order to return to their
hotels for a well-deserved rest.

On Tuesday morning Barbara Bush, four other first ladies
(Danielle Mitterrand, Mila Mulroney, Livia Andreotti, and Sachiyo
Kaifu), and fourteen wives of foreign and finance ministers flew to San
Antonio for a whirlwind five-hour visit to the Alamo, Mission San Jose

with its famous "Rosa's Window," and the River Walk. Back in Houston
the motorcades began arriving at Rice at 8: 29 A. M. in protocol order;
President Bush greeted the heads of delegations as they arrived. Each
head went briefly to his or her Herring Hall holding room. Staff persons,
who had arrived not by motorcade but by car, parked in the stadium
parking lot, then ridden in a shuttle bus to Herring Hall, were already at
work (indeed, had worked far into the previous night) preparing the
documents for the day's agenda. Each delegation was provided one fax
machine, a personal computer with laser printer, and telephones; two
copiers were available on the third floor of Herring, and lounges at the east
and west ends of the third floor had two televisions — one of which carried
the CBS Pool Feed — and daily newspapers and selected weekly periodi-
cals from around the world. The Baker College Commons served as the
dining hall for all the staff; it offered "continental dishes with a Southwest-
em flair" for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the food being prepared during

the day under contract by Wyatt's Cafeteria and at night by Rice's own
food service.

The foreign and finance ministers, along with the sherpas,
attended the Tuesday plenary meetings that began at 9:00 A. M. in the
O'Connor Reading Room of Herring Hall. The plenary session ended
shortly after noon, then, at 12:30 P. M, the heads of delegations left
Herring Hall, boarded a shuttle bus for a trip of several hundred feet,
exited the bus, and — another carefully arranged photo opportunity —
walked eight abreast, unaccountably out of protocol order, toward the
Faculty Club where they had a working lunch. The lunch was prepared
under the direction of caterer Jackson Hicks, but much of the actual cook-
ing was done by the Faculty Club's assistant manager, John Holbert. Club
manager Rick Gaido was on hand to supervise the building operations.
President Bush noticed him, introduced himself and then introduced Mr.
Gaido to Mrs. Thatcher, and asked Mr. Gaido to tell her about the various

courses of study offered at Rice. Before Mr. Gaido finished the list, Mrs.
Thatcher interjected "and architecture." She obviously had been briefed
that the School of Architecture's building renovation and enlargement had
been designed by the eminent British architect, James Sterling. Later,
during the actual luncheon, President Bush had Mr. Gaido summoned.
"Tell our guests about the size of the Rice endowment," he asked. Mr.
Gaido provided the figure to the interested guests. Still later, remarking
that somehow, in the midst of all the preparations, note pads had not been
provided for the participants in this working lunch, President Bush asked
Mr. Gaido if he could bring them some sheets of the Faculty Club's
stationery. Mr. Gaido's unexpected involvement served to personalize
the summit for him; and many other Rice faculty, staff, and administrators
had similar individual experiences that, small in their way, will loom
large in each person's memories of the 1990 Economic Summit of Indus-
trialized Nations.

The other participants in the Tuesday plenary session divided
into their constituent groups for their own working lunches. The finance
ministers ate at a table set up in the Lovett Lounge, outside the Kyle
Morrow Room on the third floor of Fondren Library; the foreign ministers,
dined in the President's House, on campus; and the sherpas participated in
a working luncheon in a private dining room on the second floor of the
Faculty Club. Lower ranking staff, as usual, dined in Baker Commons.
At approximately 2:45 P. M. all twenty-four delegates and eight sherpas
returned to the O'Connor Reading Room in Herring Hall to continue
meeting in plenary session. This plenary was originally scheduled to
adjourn at 4:00, but the press of the issues under discussion kept the
session underway until 5:30, requiring President Bush to push back the
formal evening dinner scheduled to begin at the Museum of Fine Arts at
7:00. Before the afternoon plenary concluded, Secretary of State Baker
held a press conference at the Brown Center to report on the progress of

the meetings.

The Tuesday evening dinner was a festive, gala affair, much
unlike the working dinners on Monday night. A staff mix-up, perhaps
caused by the late ending of the afternoon plenary, resulted in President
Bush's not having his prepared remarks as he rose to toast the guests, so
he ad-libbed that "There is no work here tonight. No communique, no
amendments, no language to be corrected. We simply want you to have a
very good time at this museum that we in Houston are very proud of."
Those informal, genuine remarks marked the tone of the evening. Mrs.
Bush and her San Antonio entourage had returned; Vice-President and
Mrs. Quayle flew in for the occasion; each nation had a dinner delegation
of around a dozen; and there were twenty Houston and Texas guests
representing the state, city, and county governments and the leading
educational institutions of the city. Charles and Anne Duncan and George
and Nancy Rupp represented Rice.

The approximately 1 20 diners were seated at a dozen tables,
attended by five White House butlers brought in for the elegant repast;
local waiters also attended, but they had undergone a six-hour training
session on Sunday. The tablecloths were white with raspberry-colored
overlays, and the tables were set with china supplied by Tiffany's. A full-
sized portrait of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull, loaned by the
U. S. Treasury Department, hung behind President Bush as he delivered
his welcome toast. The dinner, prepared by a trio of chefs — Robert Del
Grande, Dean Fearing, and Robert McGrath — began with chilled yellow
tomato soup with avocado relish, complemented with miniature butter-
milk biscuits, and was followed by hickory grilled veal loin medallions
with morels in pan sauce and served with sweet corn pudding, 7-grain
rolls and Parker House rolls, salad of Texas lettuce with croutons, walnut
vinaigrette dressing, and a selection of American cheeses; the dessert was
a cobbler of Texas Cherokee blackberries and peaches with sweetened
cream. Among the wines was the medal-winning Llano Estacado
Chardonnay from Lubbock, Texas.

At the conclusion of the long dinner during which several
guests were reported to have been nodding, everyone adjourned to the
Brown Auditorium, where eighty other invited guests joined the dinner
guests to enjoy an evening of eclectic entertainment ranging from actress
Cicely Tyson to bluegrass performer Ricky Skaggs to singer Marilyn
McCoo to comic juggler Michael Davis. A tired group of delegates
departed late that evening, but back at Rice, the sherpas and various staff
persons stayed up most of the night putting the final touches on the sum-
mit statement, the discussion of which had lengthened the Tuesday after-
noon plenary.

By the time the heads of delegations, foreign and finance
ministers, and sherpas assembled at 9:00 A. M. the next morning,
Wednesday, July 1 1 . around the handsomely crafted, 40-foot long oval
table in Herring Hall, the final text of the summit-ending "Houston Sum-
mit Declaration" had been drafted overnight by the indefatigable delega-

tion staffs. Only formalities remained, and so little of substance was
required Wednesday morning that President Mitterrand was able to slip
away to the architecture school of the University of Houston, which
bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in humanities for his significant
achievements in public building in France. It was hoped, too, that he
would work with exchange students from the university after his retire-
ment from the presidency. An exhibit entitled "Architectures Capitales de
Paris" complemented the French president's visit to the University of
Houston.

By shortly after 10:00 A. M. the remainder of the delegates .
were finishing up at Rice and beginning a motorcade parade from Rice,
through downtown Houston where large crowds lined the streets and
cheered the passing limousines, to the Brown Convention Center. The
motorcades arrived ahead of schedule. President Bush and the delegation
heads proceeded to the Assembly Hall on the third floor of the Brown
Center. Barbara Bush and a large group of delegation spouses had had a
series of individualized tours of the Texas Medical Center earlier in the
morning, but they too had come to the Brown Center. President Bush,
joined on the stage by the seven other heads of delegations, formally
presented the summit's final communique, the "Houston Summit Declara-
tion." Speaking for the assembled delegations. Bush stated that "we are
enormously heartened by the resurgence of democracy throughout the
world," then he cautioned that much additional work and compromise
remained to be done on a variety of issues mutually involving the gathered
industrial nations and their relationships to the Soviet Union. After in
effect declaring the completed summit a success, President Bush ad-
journed the meeting. He and the otHer delegation heads held brief news
conferences afterwards; the peripatetic Bush was soon off to tour the
dining area of the Brown Center and to thank the cooks and food servers.
Then it was back to his Texas home in The Houstonian, a quick change
into jogging clothes, and a twenty-minute, tension-releasing run through
nearby Memorial Park. The 1 990 Economic Summit was over.

From the beginning of planning for the official summit events,
George Bush and summit organizers had also made plans for a
giant party to thank the thousands of volunteers and contributors
who made the event possible. The "Thank You, Houston" party
was held on the campus of the University of Houston, beginning at 3:00
P. M. Wednesday afternoon. Visitors found that portion of the campus as
spruced up as the Rice campus had been for its share of summit events. In
fact, the University of Houston apparently planted more sod and trees than
Rice did, because, like Rice, the University of Houston wanted to make a
favorable impression on its visitors. Even the large fountain that had been
broken was repaired for the occasion. The whole affair had the festive
atmosphere of a down-home county fair midway combined with the
international flair of a world's fair. Tents elaborately decorated with the
flags and symbols of the various summit nations dispensed that nation's
traditional foods. Flags festooned the whole area, with live music of every
imaginable kind filling the air. Strolling mimes and jugglers contributed
to the celebratory ambience.

One could feast on European delicacies or Texas barbecue
cooked over a pit that had a 30-foot-tall replica of an oil well towering
above it. The afternoon's heat was battled by more than a hundred electric
fans, while persons attending were given hand fans in the shape of
Houston's distinctive skyline. Caterer Jackson Hicks, who seemed to be
everywhere during the summit — he had supervised the food at the Satur-
day evening Media Fest in the museum district, the Barbara Bush spouses'
dinner at the Liedtkes, and the formal dinners served on the Rice cam-
pus — along with others (Ninfa's, Luther's, Bennie Ferrell, Marthann
Masterson, and the University of Houston College of Hotel and Restaurant
Management), prepared the food for this final summit bash. All the food
was donated, and anonymous contributions reimbursed the University of
Houston for all the expenses it had incurred.

In the midst of the public carnival of food and entertainment,
two restricted parties were underway. The Bushes themselves hosted a

party for about 140 of the top volunteers in the College of Architecture
Building, freshly painted for the summit, while in nearby Farish Hall
certain summit volunteers and University of Houston regents hosted a
cocktail party for several hundred persons and corporate representatives
who had each donated in excess of $10,000 to the Houston Host Commit-
tee. At 6:00 P. M. a succession of local musical groups — Die Hofbrau
Kapelle, the Asian-American Dance Co., The Gypsies, and Mariachi Los
Galliotos and the Grupo Zapata folklore dancers — began to warm up the
crowd for the official show. Then at 7:00 the crowd of approximately
8,000 that was gathered before the giant, 1 20-foot-long stage decorated
with the Houston skyline, futuristic space scenes, and a stylized version of
stars and stripes, heard a star-studded musical and comedic performance.
George Bush personally thanked the people of Houston from the stage:
"You've shown the world what Houston hospitality is all about," he said
to an appreciative audience.

The show, broadcast live on three local television channels,
provided a rollicking good time, with toe-tapping music by Randy Travis
and Marilyn McCoo and comedy by Fred Travelena, who pleased the
crowd with his impressions of George Bush. Native Houston actress Lisa
Hartman emceed the patriotic show, which ended with the fourteen
hundred tiny lights on the stage spelling out Houston, then flickering in
such a computer-controlled way as to appear to be fluttering in the wind
like a flag. Houston had gone all out to make the 1990 Economic Summit
a success, and this was a fitting, self-congratulatory way to end three
spectacular days of diplomacy and pageantry.

"WE DID IT!" shouted the Houston Post's headline Thurs-
day morning, an accurate summation of how many Houstonians felt. Now
it was back to everyday business as workers removed the last vestiges of
summit equipment from the Brown Center, cleaned up the trash on the
U.of H. campus from the previous night's party, and began to turn the
meeting sites at Rice from their temporary use as summit sets back into
academic rooms. Rice provided a box lunch picnic to all its faculty and
staff, offered behind-the-scenes tours of the summit sites, and gave its staff
the rest of the day off as a mark of appreciation for the hard work and
good cheer everyone had shown during weeks of summit preparations and
inconvenience. After the summit was all over, people had time to reflect
on what had occurred, to wonder about the significance of the official
plenary meetings of the heads of delegations and the impact on Houston of
being for several days in the world's spotlight.

The city did get much national and international press cover-
age, with stories about its economy coming back as the television screens
depicted the soaring downtown skyline. But condescending, almost
snickering stories about Houston trying too hard to impress and about the
gaucheries of the rodeo competed with positive accounts. Every report
seemed to mention the temperature, although, ironically, it had been
several degrees hotter in Washington, D. C, than in Houston on Monday,

when the outdoor opening ceremonies were held. Rice University re-
ceived wonderful coverage in the local papers and on local television,
several positive stories in Texas papers, and glittering references in several
foreign newspapers, but the major national newspapers and news maga-
zines seldom did more than mention Rice as the actual site of the summit
meetings. Nevertheless those worldwide television images of the heads of
delegations walking on the campus electrified Rice alumni and friends and
filled them with pride. Houston and Rice officials comforted themselves
with the thought that the seeds of favorable opinions were planted, and
stories, investments, and contributions would come later. Within months
these hopes began to appear justified. Perhaps even the Bush Presidential
Library would be located in Houston, the most obvious and sensible place,
and associated with Rice.

People also realized that the official summit was not the only
summit that had occurred in Houston. Meeting simultaneously in the
AstroVillage Hotels had been The Other Economic Summit, or TOES,
where advocates of the poor, the homeless, the environment, and a variety
of other significant causes met to explore the issues of peace and justice.
These had been public, not private meetings, and speakers there discussed
what was often ignored or avoided by the official delegates huddled at
Rice. The proceedings at Rice were restricted, and all that we can know
about the substance of the plenaries is what the participants chose to
reveal in press conferences and in the communique issued at the end, the
"Houston Summit Declaration." What, after all, had the official summit
meetings, the focus of all the attention, planning, and expenditures,
actually decided?

The three largest, most time-consuming issues discussed at the 1990
Economic Summit were aid to the Soviet Union to assist President
Gorbachev, environmental concerns to limit the industrialized
nations' production of carbon dioxide, which pollutes the atmo-
sphere, and the controversy over limiting farm subsidies, which the United
States and Canada strongly believe distort agricultural exports and world
trade. A series of ambiguously worded compromises permitted various
sides to claim modest victories, but each of the participating nations was
allowed, essentially, to pursue its own policies.

Chancellor Kohl pushed hardest for substantial Western aid
for the Soviet Union, while President Bush led the opposition. Bush
argued that with Soviet missiles still aimed at U. S. targets and with the
Russians still giving Cuba $5 billion in aid annually, it was difficult to
defend Western monetary assistance. Kohl and Bush in a private meeting
Monday morning and in intense plenary discussions accepted a compro-
mise; Germany and other nations could unilaterally give assistance to the
Soviet Union and to the new governments in Eastern Europe, and the
summit nations acting jointly authorized a task force coordinated by the
International Monetary Fund, assisted by four other international lending
and development institutions, to study Soviet economic needs and to issue
a nonbinding report by the end of the year. So Germany can send money
to Russia, the United States will not, and they all agreed to study the
matter further. Japan's unilateral aid to the People's Republic of China
occasioned little dispute.

The United States was decidedly in the minority as it opposed
Europe-led proposals to establish a definite timetable for limiting global
emissions of carbon dioxide. The Bush administration — led on this issue
by John Sununu — argued that the scientific evidence is inconclusive on
the degree to which human-initiated carbon dioxide contributes to envi-
ronmental problems. The Bush opposition succeeded in getting the
European nations to refrain from insisting on setting up a schedule for

reducing carbon dioxide emissions in return for a proposal that the World
Bank initiate a year-long study of ways to protect and preserve Brazil's
Amazonian rain forest. At the end of the study, the World Bank research-
ers and Brazilian authorities will bring a specific plan to be studied and
ratified at the 1991 Economic Summit. Environmentalists were dismayed
by this actual decision, though they could perhaps take some heart from
the wording of the Houston communique that seemed an oblique refuta-
tion of Governor Sununu's position. The first paragraph of the section on
the environment stated that "We agree that, in the face of threats of irre-
versible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty is no
excuse to postpone actions which are justified in their own right."

On no issue did President Bush negotiate harder than on the
agricultural subsidies that play havoc with U. S. farm exports. While all
nations have subsidies of one sort or another, those of the United States
and Canada are insignificant compared to those of Europe and Japan.
Germany and Japan in particular have very inefficient agricultural econo-
mies, but they argue that for social and environmental reasons their system
of small farms must be propped up artificially by governmental export
subsidies and import restrictions. Despite an intensity of U. S. effort that
frankly surprised some European diplomats, no specific final decision was
made. The final communique pledged commitment to the goal of the
"reform of agricultural policies," "to improve market access," and "to
permit the greater liberalization of trade in agricultural products." But
actual progress on these matters was left to ongoing negotiation within the
procedures of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the Uru-
guay Round of discussions on trade restrictions that began four years ago.

More important than any decisions made or not made was the
strong consensus on the positive march of democratic ideals in the past
year. Every participant in the Houston meetings was aware of the historic
transformation that had recently taken place in Eastern Europe, events that
gave this first post-Cold War summit a special significance. There was an

implicit sense that time and history are on our side and a corresponding
recognition of the necessity of getting along even if that meant agreeing at
times to disagree. As the Italian foreign minister, Gianni De Michelis, put
it. "With the West so near to final victory with respect to our struggles
over the last 40 years, it would be a criminal form of stupidity to enhance
West- West tensions now." It was also clear at the summit that the United
States and Russia no longer control the world; just as clear was the emer-
gence of the strong economies of Germany and Japan, which the person-
alities of Kohl and Kaifu in different ways complemented. Margaret
Thatcher commented at one point that "there are three regional groups at
this summit, one based on the dollar, one based on the yen, one on the
Deutsche mark." Western diplomacy would increasingly have to take
notice of that emerging balance of power.

The democratic industrialized powers were determined
together to face with hope the coming decade and the imminent arrival of
a new century. With that sentiment the eighty-fourth and final paragraph
of the final communique read: "We have accepted the invitation of Prime
Minister Thatcher to meet next July in London." Thus the modem institu-
tion of international summitry will continue as a way to mediate and
promote the issues of economic development and democratic progress.
The city of Houston and Rice University cherish the opportunity of having
been asked to host the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations.
For everyone closely involved, it was an exhilarating moment in the
history of both the city and the university.

Summit Participants

Heads of Delegations:

President George Bush
President Frangois Mitterrand
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
Chancellor Helmut Kohl
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney
Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti
Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu
President Jacques Delors

Finance Ministers:

Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F. Brady

Minister of Economy, Finance and Budget Pierre Beregovoy

Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major

Minister of Finance Theodor Waigel and Minister of Economic Affairs

Helmut Haussmann
Minister of Finance Michael Wilson
Minister of the Treasury Guido Carli
Minister of Finance Ryutaro Hashimoto and Minister of International

Trade and Industry Kabun Muto
Vice President for Economic and Financial Affairs Henning

Christophersen

Foreign Ministers:

Secretary of State James A. Baker, III

Minister of Foreign Affairs Roland Dumas

Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

Douglas Hurd
Minister for Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher
Secretary of State for External Affairs Joe Clark
Minister of Foreign Affairs Gianni De Michelis
Minister for Foreign Affairs Taro Nakayama
Vice President for External Relations Frans Andriessen

Sherpas:

Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Richard T. McCormack

Special Counselor to the President Jacques Attali

Second Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury Nigel Wicks,

CVO.CBE
State Secretary, Federal Ministry of Finance Horst Kohler
Ambassador of Canada to the United States Derek Bumey
Diplomatic Counselor to the Prime Minister Umberto Vattani
Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Koji Watanabe
Chief of Staff to the President of the Commission of the European

Community Pascal Lamy

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